I had to stay away yesterday because I knew how much of a shit show this thread would be. There's a clear desire by many who didn't want to have the last manager ousted to take out their anger on this manager, which is silly and counter productive, but this is how it is.
In my opinion, BOTH managers have been undone by the players, like has been said above. This season has been absurdly impacted by injury, but the players who were signed as expensive depth are either injured or not good enough. You can speak a lot about systems, and I speak quite a bit about them because I think they are important, but there's nothing you can do to force players to take their chances when they come, or to not cock up the one time they're asked to make a defensive play or stop a shot.
IMO, when the manager gets it wrong, you can tell because the team is dominated. Bayern being the classic example, this manager got that one wrong and the team was unable to even get a foothold in the match as a result. A match like yesterday's was always going to be tough. Pointing to all of the changes is illusory, many of them were forced. Counting Richards for Zabs and Kolarov for Clichy is also daft, they've been chopping between those fullbacks for seasons now.
We had plenty of the ball yesterday and absolutely battered them in the 2nd half. They took pretty much their only real chance, off a foul, and converted it. We had Kolarov sending rockets into row ZZ. Aguero, who has been phenomenal, had an off day. The only thing that angered me and hopefully angered the manager as well was the noticeable increase in effort and intensity around 75-80 minutes. If they had played that hard from the start they would have found joy in the match eventually. Yaya, in particular, started suddenly playing late on.
The thing that I hope the manager can address is the way to approach the packed defenses. This is something Mancini didn't unlock, and the early results for MP haven't been much improved. This is very hard, and it probably relies more on the talents of players than a tactical nous by the manager. The thing that was disappointing about this yesterday was that players weren't putting themselves into positions to help, so we were often attacking 6 or 7 versus 10. MIcah/Zabs were running all over the space Navas was trying to occupy. Yaya and Milner were staying deep, while DeMichelis was coming forward like an experienced CB should to try to add to the attack, with him just a few feet away from the CMs. Meanwhile, we know at this point what Navas is going to do, yet we had nobody in the box ready to get onto the ends of those crosses.
The one player I'll give a pass to is Nasri. He worked hard yesterday and tried to be a creative engine, but couldn't really create what we needed. Nonetheless, I don't think he did anything wrong, aside from he and Yaya preferring to pass to each other over other options too often.
