City were far superior but at 1-1 looked vulnerable. Their failure to make the most of their many chances will concern GuardiolaFor a while now, it has been apparent that the goals-against column in the Premier League table did not mean what it appeared to when considering Manchester City. It shows 35 goals conceded, the second lowest total in the league, just two behind the champions, Liverpool. But that does not mean City have the second-best defence in the league.Friday’s Champions League win over Real Madrid was highly impressive, an emphatic 2-1 defeat of the newly crowned Spanish champions that represented City’s finest European night at the Etihad of the Sheikh Mansour era, but it also highlighted that the fact...
Liverpool’s key advantage over Manchester City was their ability to better organise attacks and manage the transition to defenceIt has become increasingly clear this season that, at elite level, two attributes separate the very best managers from the rest: their capacity to manage the transition from attack to defence; and their ability to organise an attack, particularly against deep-lying opponents. Jürgen Klopp has excelled at both and the Swabian school of pressing, of which he is the leading practitioner, becomes ever more widespread.The figures have been muddied by Liverpool’s recent relaxation but, after 31 games of the season, the week the title was confirmed, Manchester City had scored seven more goals than Liverpool; Liverpool had conceded 12 fewer. Essentially, what...
Pep Guardiola’s side could still win a trophy treble this season but malfunctions in their pressing game are proving costlyTo an extent it doesn’t matter. Manchester City will almost certainly finish second in the Premier League and all defeat to Manchester United did on Sunday was hasten the moment at which Liverpool will be crowned champions. City’s priorities over the next few months lie in the FA Cup, the Champions League and the court of arbitration for sport. But losing to your neighbours three times in a season can never not matter, and there is the wider issue of how City, again, found themselves outmatched by a side that sat deep and countered at pace.It’s not enough to point out...
Forget fancy formations and statistics. Tottenham’s win over City proves that the game remains riotously randomThere came a point, some time between Ilkay Gündogan missing an open goal and Oleksandr Zinchenko getting himself sent off and Davinson Sánchez heading the ball against his own crossbar from point-blank range, when you realised that whatever they tried, whatever they did, Manchester City were not going to score. It happens. Some days you just catch a whiff of bad juju at breakfast, can’t shake the feeling on the bus to the stadium, miss a couple of early chances and the entire afternoon simply unravels with a strange and unstoppable momentum. Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, once wrote a book called The Ball Doesn’t...
Carabao Cup exhibition gave a reminder of the potency of Pep Guardiola’s side, though a new centre-back might come in handyThere was something almost refreshing about Manchester City’s performance in beating Manchester United in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday. Here was a Pep Guardiola side back to its best, passing and moving, a blur of a thousand midfielders confounding duller-witted opponents. Gone was the fragility to the counter that had enabled Marcus Rashford to eviscerate them in the Premier League at the beginning of December, and diminished with it was the thought that this might be a side in terminal decline.When great teams go, they can collapse suddenly. As City struggled against United, Wolves (again) and Newcastle, it was possible...