The Skipper

This isn't the right game to being Marin on, he hasn't played at all this season why bring him on against City?

Tevez on. Christ.

Decent shot by Torres considering that was his left... Still at this level you need to take those chances.

Good pressure. Have to be wary on counter attacks though.

It happens in every box, don't know why they're trying to single out Kompany and Luiz.

Swansea have been doing it for half a decade now though but we haven't. If we want to develop a philosophy like that it'll take time and patience, something our fans and our owner clearly don't have.

Mata usually comes alive in the last 30 minutes, we need him. He hasn't performed yet but it's still early times.

Torres' acceleration over the 10 yards has frantically decreased, we really can't play this counter attacking system with him up front.

Cesar is having a good game.

We can't really play a counter attacking system with this version of Torres upfront sorry.

Defending is a lot better but the attacking prowess naturally declines.

What has he done? FFS

City do the same pretty much, but have Aguero coming off Dzeko. It's going to be a tight game.

We don't have a pure passer in the pivot, shouldn't really expect that from them. What I should say is the pivot is defending well.

Pivot is playing well.

It doesn't help because we need an initiator in midfield but we don't have it, that's why we need to rely on our defenders (especially Luiz) to make the forward passes.

Great start.

No point in replying, lets just enjoy the game okay, and try not to blame everything on Luiz.

He's not the biggest culprit, he's just the scape goat.

No one has said Luiz hasn't been bad this month, get over it. We need a big performance from the WHOLE team as a defensive unit, not just Luiz.

Lets all pick on Luiz because its entirely his fault our defence has been so poor these last few weeks...

So, Rafa starts Luiz over Cahill. Must be a big surprise to some of you.

Skrtel would be a terrible signing.

I'll be the first one to admit that Luiz has been terrible over the last month, but that doesn't mean he's a terrible footballer. Luiz has shown to all of us, even though not consistently, that he does have the capability to produce excellent performances. I try to be positive about every player - I liked Kalou as a player, never really slagged him off because his role was as a squad player... People expected our Salomon to produce world class performances whenever he played but I never had that sort of expectation about him, he was a quality squad player IMO. Luiz's case is obviously different as he's obviously meant to be a first team starter - but I feel the media crucification of Luiz being a poor defender has actually gone to a lot of people's head, and with his poor performances recently people do the math and think "Oh wait, Alan Hansen is right" but no... I think Luiz is a really good player, his only problem is his inconsistency and that'll come with age. I'm willing to stick my neck out and say if we stick with Luiz now and let him mature for a season or two we will have an excellent defender on our hands. That's just my opinion though, and I can agree with the criticism thrown at Luiz but some are way over the top - e.g. to blame all of the goals we conceded against Atletico on Luiz is ridiculous IMO. Our defensive organisation has been poor as a team for weeks now but people seem to shift all the blame to Luiz unjustifiably in my opinion.

They do need to win or draw to top the group I think, so maybe we could expect something. I think it's going to be a draw though.