teams stay deep,they dont commit , if they did they would get thrashed, they start at 0-0 and 99% of teams would be delighted if it finished that way, pace wont get behind a defence that sits so deep, passing and movement will, we dont need fast players usually, we need clever players who can see a space and can pick a pass, when teams do need to come out then the faster players are more helpful, control,passing and intelligence has worked for us, i really cant see why people are a bit down at the moment.
Why would you do anything else, honestly?
Tell you something. At the beginning of the 2017-18 season (people, journalists, had started making sarcastic comments about how “Oh, Pep can do it in Spain, Germany, and he can do it with Messi, but he'll see it's something else here”), we went to Watford. Now Watford may not be prime Barcelona, but they were a Premier League team, professional footballers, and that already puts them in a tiny elite among the thousands of players who play football either at amateur or professional level in the U.K. We're talking about what? a couple of hundred players, if you allow the size of the squad, among thousands and thousands.
Well, it wasn't just the fact that we absolutely thrashed them. We moved them around the pitch at will, like inert puppets. We made them look like a team
many, many levels below us. We made them look like a bunch of schoolkids rushing round the yard at break time, desperately searching for the ball. I'd never seen anything quite like it, not even from the best of the Mancini/Pellegrini teams. Not even from the Mercer/Allison team. I was astounded. Pep had taken a season to get his message over, to get his system going. Now something very special was clearly happening. I didn't know what it was at that point.
It was the beginning of the full-on Pep era, which is continuing to this day. After that season — the 100-pointer — everybody had twigged that if they went toe to toe with us, they would be done, and done proper. There was only one thing to be done: sit very deep, eleven men behind the ball for 2/3 to 3/4 of the match, and catch us on the break with a long ball over the top to a very speedy winger or striker. We've lost a few matches, and they've nearly always been like that.
Only the dippers (I have to hand this to them) have dared to go toe to toe with us, and been successful in doing it at times.
In Europe it's been a somewhat different story. Even then, Leipzig went toe to toe last season and they were blown to smithereens. And Leipzig are not a bad team, far from it.
And yes, some fans of other clubs have started saying that it can be boring watching City.
But it's not us that's boring! The
other team sets up to make it as boring as possible. It rarely works, but sometimes the Brentfords and Wolves of this world beat us doing it. Why would you come out and play us at our own game when you know for a certainty that you're going to be beaten not 1-0, but obliterated 4-0 or 5-0. It wasn't far off working for Brentford last night, and my takeaway message if I were Frank would be, “Yep, let's do that again. But for a defender's slip, we could have walked away with a point against the treble winners, and reigning European champions”. And in fact in the first ten minutes of the game they could have taken the lead.
This is our reality, and we have to live with it. Brentford did not feel they had to play the same way against LFC (and by the way, there is absolutely clownish defending by Brentford on the last two goals that Liverpool scored — watch them back on the highlights — of which I saw not one single sign last night). No team is as feared as us, throughout Europe.