Three months ago, I put the wrong fuel in my car through not concentrating after a long day at work. When the AA fella turned up, he turned out to be a season ticket holder at Klanfield. He told me it'd take up to 90 minutes to drain & put fresh fuel in my tank, so we got to talking football.
He was scarily spot on with his assessment of City imo, & this was before our recent collapse. The first thing he mentioned was our change in attacking approach, which he said made us less predictable but easier to play against.
He lamented about how our overlapping FB's would link with inverted wingers & the No 8 & 10, to play intricate 1 & 2 touch football out wide, then slice through the opposition defence for the cutback from the byline, which was inevitably drilled home.
He said everyone knew what City were gonna do, but we were so good at it, stopping us was another matter altogether. He noted 2 big changes. The first was the change in our attacking approach to accommodate Haaland. He said this made us less predictable, BUT easier to play against, as all the opposition had to do was crowd out Erling.
The second was the inverted full backs. He said flooding the midfield & surrounding Haaland to cut off his supply was the first part, but then hitting the ball out to the wings on the counter, with two attackers coming at us through the middle, was giving the opposition a regular 4 vs 3 advantage, with our three back-pedaling.
He was absolutely spot on. The goals we're conceding are eerily similar & seem to emanate from individual errors forced by defensive panic. It's too much of a coincidence that every team is setting up & playing the same way against us, & yielding results.
It's beyond time we went for a 4-3-3 reset, & rebuilt our battered confidence from the base we learned from. The first 20 minutes against Everton & their equaliser sums up where we're going wrong & what we need to do to arrest our slide.
The issue is, if opposition fans recognise these things, then why hasn't Pep & our coaching staff? They must have seen something for the first 20 minutes to have us playing with a flat back 4, BUT what made us revert to inverted FB's & Kovacic dropping back to make a defensive 3, after things started so well?
