The mancityfans.net football forum

Mikhail Chigorin wrote:

Peter Doherty (AGAIG) wrote:

Wooders wrote:Why though? What do we owe them?

We should only have one priority - what's best for manchester city football club, its none of our concern what happens with other teams league position.
We had a good chance to play a couple of the more prominent youngsters, I'm not talking about putting out the whole eds team here - but what would have been wrong with bringing a couple off the bench for a bit of game time?

It's for the integrity of the competition. If we needed Sunderland to get a point at Chelsea in the last game (for us to win the league) and Sunderland send out a team full of kids we'd be fuming and the competition would be devalued.

It's a bit like the time when Mick McCarthy, as Wolves manager, played a 'second string' team at the Swamp because he knew they would get beaten and he wanted to 'save' his first choice players for those games they needed to win.