City 1 - 1 Fulham: Return of the draw specialist

Fulham earned their point yesterday in the face of a rather flat City performance - extending our poor recent home form against the London side (one victory in the past eight seasons).  As a frustrated Mancini is probably all too aware, these are the sorts of games that we should be winning in the race for a Champions' League spot.

There was a moment about half way through the second half when Pablo Zabaleta ran some thirty yards to block a defender's clearance, before turning (possibly in the direction of Jerome Boateng - who had just backed out of a challenge he was clear favourite to win) and gesturing that the team needed more aggression and desire.  In some ways Zabaleta's frustration summed up the afternoon.  

Even though it is a weak excuse, the team certainly looked jaded and this could be symptomatic of games every three or four days since the Manchester derby with a squad that is getting more and more depleted.  By contrast, Fulham have just returned from a break in the Algarve.  City will get very little sympathy for such worries, with the strength of the squad we have, and I am not suggesting that this should excuse the performance yesterday, but it probably is starting to have an effect on the players who have to play all the games.  Regardless, if all the players had the same attitude as Pablo Zabaleta, then City would always out-compete teams.  

I would argue that only four outfield starting players performed to an expected level yesterday: Zabaleta, Lescott, Barry and, despite Mancini's comments after the game, Mario Balotelli.  Despite the odd frustrating moment, Balotelli actually worked quite hard for the team yesterday - often doubling up as a left-sided midfielder and covering Kolarov.  Balotelli's was more of a team performance than he put in against Aris, for example, and I thought he looked more settled, rather than trying to pull off the outlandish all the time - which has often been the case as he has tried to impress.  His goal was brilliantly taken and he was our main attacking threat, as Tevez had one of those days when he tries to run through people, on his own, and without realising there is too much of Hangeland to run through.    

Taking Tevez out of the equation, our top three performers this season were missing - Kompany, Silva and De Jong - and Mancini will be hoping their calming, creative and crushing respective influences will be returning soon.  Without Silva there is a noticeable lack of verve and impetus from midfield going forward - and City's midfield struggled to offer many scraps for the strikers.  Yaya Toure cut a particularly frustrated figure after the Fulham midfield kept him well shackled - after being a very influential figure in the excellent performance at Craven Cottage, he was almost anonymous here.  

Fulham did play very well though and their goal was of top quality - fans around me were trying to pin blame on moments up to a minute earlier, but the speed and precision of the move and Andy Johnson's delivery deserved the moment.  

Overreactions abound, as ever, when results don't go the way you want them to, but this is just one result in a string of very good home results and performances - and, despite what you may presume reading some of the reactions across the internet, it was still a point.  

On an entirely different note, the atmosphere was about as flat as the performance yesterday.  I know the tiny Fulham following support didn't help matters (the South stand had already decided it would be better to pick on other stands rather than the away fans they could hardly see by about five minutes in), but the home support was hardly conducive to a passion-filled performance from the players.  I know there is a little of the chicken and the egg about this - should the players excite the fans to an extent? - but it was pretty flat following the atmosphere against Aris.

Maybe the City fans were just a little bewildered due to the slightly peculiar 'televisation' of our half-time.  I may be a bit old-fashioned/grumpy, but one of the bonuses of going to live football is that you escape fifteen minutes of football punditry in the break.  This is nothing against the people involved - I'm sure what they had to say was quite interesting, and I don't mind having endless replays on the big screens, but I'd rather hear the murmurings of the crowd at half-time than long pieces of punditry on what was a quite uneventful first-half anyway.  Oh well...