It's partly because he's been out for so long and his appearances have been so stop start that we've barely seen him lately but some of the summaries of Mendy pre-injury are so far off reality, its bizarre.
He was never blisteringly fast, it wasn't his main attribute at all. He had good pace to get up and down his flank, but it wasn't close to being he's main attribute.
His best attributes were his delivery and his intelligent passing, his pressing really well and winning the ball back in midfield or the final third. There's a reason both Bielsa and Pep - two managers who are obsessed with positional intelligence - fell in love with Mendy.
Similarly, people who say he can't defend obviously didn't watch the games he's played for us vs. Liverpool in his first season, or Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs in his second season. All clean sheets all excellent defensive performances. He also had great defensive performances for Monaco in their title winning season and games vs. PSG which decided the title. He could defend, very well for such an attacking fullback.
What he did do early on at City, was get asked to play as a LW, which meant he was nowhere to be seen when we had a few attacks down that side, but as people argued on here at the time, if you ask any LB to stand near the opposition's by-line for 80% of the game, he won't be back defending if there's a counter attack.
I honestly think most of Mendy's problems are entirely mental. He's clearly struggling with being out of the game for 3 years in a row, he's not focused on football and you can see from some of his social media interactions that he's pretty beaten down by the constant stream of really quite abhorrent abuse he gets all day every day from 'fans' online, even when he's just posting contractually mandated "tune in to the game tonight" social media posts the club send to him.
He's brought a lot of it on himself, but footballer going off the tracks when they suddenly can't play football for a long time is a cliché because it happens all the time. Someone mentioned Michael Johnson earlier in the thread and joked about his rehab in clubs - we now know that was when he was cripplingly depressed and didn't know what else to do without playing football which was what his entire identity was built around.
The Athletic reported around the time Omar Berrada came out in support of Mendy saying they'd run all the physical tests on Mendy and his results were as good as when he arrived in 2017. So I don't think the issues are physical, although he does show the signs of someone who's low on confidence and out of match sharpness - his touch is poor, his stamina isn't there, concentration is patchy and even the magical deliveries aren't going in any more. These are the issues of someone who's not played in ages, not things he never had, or never will have again.
I don't know if Mendy will ever come back but I genuinely think he could, if he wants to, and if he can get his head back in the game. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he left the club and then turned everything around, a change of scenery and a different voice coaching him would probably do him a world of good.
Anyway this is far too long so no one will read it but I do think a lot about Mendy as we rotate a never ending stream of non-left backs into the starting 11.
