All those who loved Robert Mancini as a player may be starting to feel rewarded for their faith in his abilities as a manager. In fact, with the addition of Sergio Agüero to the side and the news of his demands for Arsenal’s Samir Nasri, his team is starting to take shape. Add to this his recent comments about needing one team for the Premier League and one for the Champions League, and the truth is revealed: the reason Man City didn’t make a tilt at the league title last year was that they didn’t have to.
Mancini, far from being the defensive-minded, scarf-wearing outsider that the British media have always presented him as, is in fact an intelligent, cautious and respectful insider as far as the men who run the club are concerned. City did not throw everything at the League last season because Mancini knew he had at least another year and another transfer window to build his team…
It has to be said that it looks like a much more impressive team now. In the encounter against Swansea, not only did Kun immediately impress, but – perhaps more importantly – Dzeko looked at home, Adam Johnson played and Nigel De Jong and Gareth Barry seemed to be comfortable with each other for once, allowing Yaya to link in what is becoming a crucial pivot role for the team. Despite the presence of both De Jong and Barry, City played with only one ball-winning midfielder at a time, allowing one or other of the pair some freedom to either hold, or offer himself once the ball had been won back: much like the ideal Obi Mikel/Essien partnership that Chelsea haven’t quite had for the last two seasons.
As a defensive measure, City’s players simply curtailed their forward runs in the first half to negate Swansea’s wingplay. The fullbacks did not attack with the same fervour that we saw in the preseason game against Inter, which meant that Johnson and Silva had slightly fewer options when coming from wide out. That was to change in the second half, when the sting was taken out of the Premier League new-comers. As Swansea’s pace faded, Micah Richards was free to maraud down the flank, allowing Johnson increased freedom to cut inside.
FIIIIIIIGHT!
It was this fundamental change in the flow of City’s play that led to the first two goals, as space was created by the interchange of attackers and overlapping defenders on the right: in the first instance, Johnson was able to cut inside due to the threat of Richards to set up Dzeko, and in the second it was Richards who profited from Johnson’s movement to play in Agüero. Even the third and fourth goals were born as much of the interchanges as they were of the Argentine’s brilliance: Dzeko played a marvellous ball to put Kun in, but had it not been for Lescott’s thrust forward moments before, he might not have had the space or time to pick his pass. Similarly, the marvellous strike for the fourth goal might not have been possible were it not for the movement in front of the pint-sized flavour of the month.
This is not to denigrate the marvellous contribution Agüero made to the game, and hopefully will in the coming season; instead it is to draw attention to the work done by Mancini in building a team in which he seems to be able to flourish straight off. Much was made of his partnership with Silva, but in the after-match car crash interviews, Gary Neville wanted to talk about Dzeko as much as Kun: no mug our Gary, without a shadow of a doubt, to be honest: Dzeko made Silva, Johnson and Agüero even better than they were. Come May, we might be talking about the signing of the season having been made last January.
Except we almost certainly won’t, because in the Schiedt’s Footballing Miscellany semi-official preseason predictions, The Tactical View has chosen Manchester City to win the EPL. Sorry about that, City fans. However, congratulations go to Wigan, QPR and Wolves on almost guaranteeing their top table survival, having been tipped to go down. (Celtic and St Mirren fans will be delighted that I have tipped them to finish second and last respectively in the SPL.) Apologies, then to both Dzeko and Mancini, who despite being somewhat misunderstood in the media, look set to prove the doubters wrong.
