It was a staggeringly inept performance against a decent, but no better, Everton side. At times we veered towards the kind of shambolic display we've seen against Ajax, Southampton, CSKA, Liverpool etc. in recent years. We looked completely ragged, and the lack of composure on display was, for a supposedly top side, staggering.
For me, our main problem was, and invariably is, the lack of compactness from front to back. I honestly haven't seen a team anywhere, at any level, this season, that plays with such ridiculously huge gaps between the lines. Inasmuch as there is so often so much talk about our 'midfield two' being the root of our problems, we saw again last night - as we have done countless other times this season - that sticking an extra man in midfield makes next to no difference. It was still ridiculously easy for them to drop balls into their front men, or into players stood in twenty yards of space in front of the back four.
As far as I can see, we either have to allow our defenders to stay deep, in which case the central midfielders have to stay right on their toes (and then we look to play on the counter at pace), or else we need to get our centre halves up the pitch and close up the gaps that way - i.e. play like we did against Chelsea at the start of the season, when Kompany and Mangala were right up on the halfway line, hitting Costa aggressively and early. For me, that's when we're at our best - the midfield two, including Yaya, was no problem at the start of the season when we were much more compact, and it allows our forward players to play much closer together. Contrary to the general view, I think our problem is that we defend far too deep - there were times last night where Everton turned the ball over in their own area, and our centre halves were stood some 25 yards back in their own half. If you were to watch Bayern, for example - in a similar situation, their back four would be a good 15, even 20 yards higher up the pitch. It's no wonder we can't press effectively, when the midfield is being to asked to cover a gap of 50-60 yards (although that doesn't excuse our forward players, who still don't work anywhere near hard enough).
The change we'll see in this regard if and when Guardiola arrives will be seismic. Someone (perhaps Prestwich Blue?) posted a link in the Guardiola thread a while back to a good article explaining how so much of his (Guardiola's, not Prestwich Blue's!) philosophy turns on keeping the team compact and the gaps between players as short as possible. The extent of the difference between how we're playing at the moment, and how we're likely to play under Guardiola, makes it nigh on impossible to judge, on the basis of current performances, who will thrive and who won't under him. To look at Yaya last night, you might well argue that he's finished as a top-level player; under Guardiola, he might still have two or three years left in him, perhaps in the Alonso role. Someone like Nasri, who many would consider too lazy to find favour with Guardiola, might thrive in a side in which the players are asked to cover shorter distances in sharper bursts. At any rate, his arrival can't come soon enough - I like Pellegrini, and have backed him plenty of times in the past, but his time with us has obviously come to an end, and there were points last night where I thought he'd lost the plot (the Fernando sub is still one which, with the greatest will in the world, I can't get my head around). I just hope we can somehow turn things around for the rest of the season, because at the moment, honestly, I fear that we're going to fall away horribly.
