Kamara: Derby defeat wouldn’t rule Man City out of the title race

Even a Manchester Derby defeat wouldn’t rule City out of the title race

There’s no doubt that Manchester City are currently going through a sticky patch!

One thing is for sure the last team they’ll want to be playing now is their closest rivals.

Having suffered two defeats on the bounce, a game against Manchester United will be a real test of their mettle.

But let’s not get too carried away. Back-to-back losses doesn’t represent a crisis, it’s just a blip.

Manuel Pellegrini is experienced enough to realise that and he’ll be working hard to put things right.

Even a defeat this weekend wouldn’t rule City out of the title race. And when it comes to January they’ve got the financial clout to improve in the transfer window.

Of course, one man they’ll have to be especially wary of is the returning Wayne Rooney.

The history says that Wayne’s done very well against Man City in the past having scored five goals in his last six games against the ‘noisy neighbours’, as well as being the all-time highest scoring player in this fixture.

How much can you look into these kind of statistics? We’ll have to suck it and see!

Is common sense starting to prevail among trigger happy Premier League chairmen?

When you look at the teams who are currently at the bottom of the Premier League you can see that their owners and chairmen are being realistic and about the long hard seasons they’re all in for.

That’s perhaps part of the reason why we haven’t seen any sackings as yet, a little bit of common sense has prevailed.

What has been proved this season is that stability is good for football, with the notable examples of Sam Allardyce at West Ham and Alan Pardew at Newcastle.

Gus Poyet at Sunderland is another manager who looks as if he’ll be afforded a bit of time to turn things around.

He got them out of trouble last season and even though his side are struggling now the club are likely to stand by him because of that achievement.

Perhaps we’re finally starting to see that clubs have learnt the lessons of getting rid of managers so quickly.

Clattenburg’s rap is quite simply ridiculous

Poor Mark Clattenburg. The Premier League ref has been banned for the next set of fixtures because of a breach of protocol but the whole situation seems ridiculous to me.

What’s the problem with him travelling separately from the rest of his team to go and watch a music gig, AFTER a match has taken place?

Managers, players and even referees have other commitments.

That’s the case when we have guests on Goals on Sunday. They’ll probably leave their teams to it and go off to prepare themselves for myself and Ben Shepherd!

I feel sorry for Mark.

It seems to have been forgotten that while he also broke the rules to ring Crystal Palace gaffer Neil Warnock, his intentions were commendable.

He only wanted to apologise to Neil for not seeing the incident last weekend where West Brom’s Craig Dawson pole-axed Julian Speroni.

That sort of transparency should be applauded but instead we’re talking about him receiving a slap on the wrist for going to see Ed Sheeran!

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