Terrible result, a terrible performance and terrible officiating

That was poor.  It was not even against a good Milan side in my opinion and that makes it all the more depressing.  It has to be said that 4-0 was in no way a fair reflection of the football game though, we thoroughly deserved to lose but not by that margin.  Nothing really dropped for us tonight and it all combined to see us go down by a heavy scorelines, and surely out of the Champions League, perhaps for the last time in a while.

Leaving the Ox on the bench was not a good decision, we lacked width and pace to support RVP in the first half particularly.  Walcott was unimaginative and ineffective, Ramsey anonymous and Rosicky average, there just wasn't enough quality to back up our leading Dutchman.  Milan looked fairly open to me in the first half, we just didn't have the tools with which to take them apart and everything dropped from them at the other end.

Boateng opened the scoring with a blinder, the new pairing of Koscielny and Vermaelen did not look well drilled, such a shame that our reliable German has picked up such a bad injury at such a key time in the season, Boateng nipped in between the centre backs and blasted home an unstoppable finish in off the bar, one nil.  The second Milan goal was clearly offside, a clear error from the officials.  We created nothing going forward in the first half, despite a decent amount of possession, the build up was too predictable, too slow and too ponderous.

Robinho then added a third in the second half after an unfortunate slip by Vermaelen, a very good finish into the bottom corner too.  Henry had come on for the useless Walcott, and he did add a bit of a presence alongside RVP, his flick set up RVP for a cracking volley which produced the save of the match from a low left Abbiati hand.  Ibrahimovich is a disgrace of a footballer and this was summed up by his embarrassing dive for Milan's penalty which turned out to be their fourth goal, Djourou stood his ground, made no tackle and did nothing, the cheating Swede threw himself over and should have had a yellow for his pathetic acting.  The ref obliged though and made our night even worse. 

A 4-0 defeat it was, we still had time to see another fine Abbiati save, this time from an RVP header.  Overall we were just not good enough and deserved nothing from this game, our attacking play was particularly predictable and toothless, while our defending was pretty shambolic at times, big Per was definitely missed. 

It was particularly hard to take the margin of defeat against such an average Milan side, especially when one goal was clearly offside and another down to a blatant act of cheating.  We were not outplayed in the midfield, we shaded possession, so do not believe the nonsense that will be spouted in certain sections of the media in this regard.  The problem was our toothless attacking play and this was partly down to a lack of quality and partly down to poor tactics from the manager.  Depressing and the worst I have seen us in Europe for a very long time indeed.