The FIFA 14 crystal ball has been a bit cloudy of late. After coming fairly close predicting the result of Norwich match, the video game has let us down over the past two weeks. After predicting rather boring 0-0 draws for cities Cardiff and Manchester, we were skeptical that FIFA 14 could regain it's early season form.
Despite our doubts, we decided to give it another go, and we were rather surprised at the results.
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As always, here are the match lights -
- While not quite as impressive as we've seen in recent weeks, the pre-match banter between Martin Tyler and Alan Smith is still very solid. They discuss Chelsea's "revolving-door managerial policy" and mention how many of Mourinho's former (and in the case of Lampard, Terry, Cole, Cech, Mikel, Essien, etc., once-former, now current) players "still talk about him in glowing terms."
- The lineup card we handed in to Fake Mourinho was based on the WAGNH community's selections, so we really only have ourselves to blame for Bizarro Chelsea failing to get the win at the pixelated park of St. James.
- Fernando Torres' avatar played a masterful ball to a perfectly positioned pixelated Hazard to start the match, but unfortunately, nothing came of it, as Torres' avatar fell down after deciding to shoot straight at Yohan Cabaye's avatar.
- Lampard's avatar had a Torresian strike in the 26th minute (only in a video game is it acceptable to call anything Lampard does "Torresian," by the way).
- Petr Cech's avatar was forced into making a terrific save after EA Sports resumed it's vendetta against David Luiz and pettily decided to make his avatar to run the wrong way when Moussa Sissoko was threatening inside the Chelsea box. Shortly thereafter, Luiz' avatar was badly beaten by the binary Ben Arfa. Luiz' avatar was also primarily responsible for Binary Ben (Arfa's) first goal towards the end of the first half, and certainly didn't do anything positive during the run up to his second goal in the 53rd minute.
- Down 2-0, Fake Mourinho decided to sub on Mikel for Lampard. Bit of a head-scratcher, that one.
- Torres' avatar cut the lead in half with a nice header off of a Hazard dink ("dink," of course, being the technical term for a very short cross).
- Despite making a little noise in the final minutes, Newcastle appeared to do a good job playing keep away after the Torres goal, and secured the 2-1 victory fairly easily.
While a very entertaining match compared to the last two weeks, it was obviously a poor result for Bizarro Chelsea. Luckily, the real thing has yet to play, and I expect that we'll see a much more palatable result tomorrow.