If Pep were to ever do that we should immediately sack him
I don't agree with people saying Pep just needs to flip the whole script and play an entirely new way to save our season, but I've been concerned by his lack of willingness to tweak
anything in our set-up at the moment. The only thing different that he seems to have tried is Grealish at CM, which works quite well, but that was abandoned after 45 mins last night and left us wide open to the transition...
again.
I love Pep, I'm definitely still backing him for now, and our injury situation is genuinely unprecedented, but you can't say our record over the last 8-10 games would be worse if he'd played O'Reilly and Wright just a bit more to save Gundogan's legs and give the midfield a bit of energy, or if he'd dropped the defensive line a little deeper for a bit just to protect Gundogan and Lewis, and vice versa Gvardiol and Walker.
The last time it ever felt this bad under Pep was the beginning of the 20-21 season, when we were mid-table in November and needed something, anything, to change things. So Pep started playing that rigid 4-2-3-1 system with Gundogan (or De Bruyne) as the most advanced player and pushed the actual strikers Jesus and Torres out to the wings - it got us to the brink of a league, League Cup, and CL treble.
He didn't change his entire philosophy, he just tweaked a couple of things to make us more solid down the middle and give us more energy and directness on the wings. I really am puzzled as to why he's so reluctant to make similar tweaks at the moment. I don't know what the players would lose out on if we briefly moved away from this current system until Kovacic, Ake, Akanji, etc. are back fit.
As soon as I saw the team last night, with Lewis, Gundogan, and Bernardo all next to each other on the teamsheet, I just felt frustrated. We've all seen the problems that trio has caused in the last six weeks but Pep seems to think something will just... change? As others have pointed out, the longer Pep's left it to give O'Reilly and Wright a bit of experience, the harder it's become to even consider playing them.
Gundogan, Lewis, and Bernardo have been flogged to death since November and it's exposing Walker and Gvardiol in every game we play now. Dias is a proper one-on-one 50/50s defender so he's looked rock solid (also why Ake missing has been so huge), but Walker and Gvardiol (and Akanji tbf) are different sorts of defenders and it's baffling that Pep has continued with a system that exposes them so badly.
It kinda reminds me of the 19-20 season when Otamendi suddenly "reverted to type" after being one of the strongest CBs in the league during the Centurions and Fourmidables seasons. What had actually happened was Fernandinho had moved into defence, David Silva had slowed down a lot, and Rodri was getting used to playing DM in a Pep side. So Otamendi was often the last man standing as teams sliced us down the middle.
The same thing's happening with Walker and Gvardiol imo. Walker's getting older and should be sold in the summer, but there's no way he's suddenly fallen off this steep a cliff, and the same goes for Gvardiol. I just don't understand what Pep's been thinking with this Gundogan-Lewis-Bernardo triangle that's helping absolutely nobody. Kovacic's return and potentially signing Bruno G in January will hopefully bring an end to it all.
