Guardiola planned to build a new cathedral on a Dias-Laporte defence but Stones has emerged as key to team’s resurgenceFootball feels at times almost wilfully contrarian, as though it delights in confounding those who try to plot a rational course through it. You can plan and plan and plan. You can have a manager who is famous for his attention to detail. You can study all the data, watch all the videos, think and plot and cogitate, formulate your grand strategy, then it turns out the answer all along was John Stones.Manchester City needed a right-sided central defender, everybody said. They had Aymeric Laporte, who was probably alongside Virgil van Dijk the best central defender in the league, but he...
Pep Guardiola would not pay £75m for Virgil van Dijk last year and City balked at £80m for Harry MaguireJohn Stones’s thigh injury makes Manchester City’s failure to sign a centre-back in the summer all the more conspicuous. Even before the 25-year-old was ruled out for up to six weeks with a problem suffered in training on Tuesday, Pep Guardiola had difficulty concealing frustration when asked about strengthening the position during the winter window.The question was posed on Friday because the manager had confirmed his defensive lynchpin, Aymeric Laporte, would be unavailable until the spring because of a damaged knee. After attempting to dismiss the signing of a stop-gap for Laporte in January as media speculation, Guardiola revealed his true...
Trent Alexander-Arnold and Joe Gomez did their cases no harm in Portugal and Harry Winks strengthened his in absentiaSunday afternoon at the Estádio D Afonso Henriques stadium and Gareth Southgate found himself once again fielding questions over the level of perceived progress in the year since the World Cup finals. England’s Nations League campaign had delivered another semi-final defeat but a first third-place finish in 51 years, no goals mustered from open play but a second successive penalty shootout success. “But the biggest sign of progress was the mentality of everyone after the loss to the Netherlands,” the manager said. “Once we’d calmed all the emotion, the theories as to why we’d lost, the drive was there. We weren’t satisfied...
The England defender, who has regularly been picked out for his mistakes in the past, often goes unnoticed when at his bestJohn Stones didn’t make much of an impression in the Manchester derby: didn’t register on the headline stats, wasn’t singled out in the post-match montage, didn’t come steaming across to launch a heroic goal-bound siege-tackle, or head the ball away with a conical white bandage twined around his bloodstained brow.This is usually a good sign when it comes to Stones, a player who only ever seems to get picked out when he makes a mistake, and whose recent run of form in a reconfigured defence provides another convincing argument City may just be ready to reach down and hit...