Dribble
Well-Known Member
From the start of the season, I've believed our success will depend on Haaland, Alvarez, Philips, Akanji & Gomez.
Haaland is the one we signed as a starter & the others were high quality first reserves outside of our strongest 11.
Haaland's made a brilliant start & is a total goal machine, but one who doesn't affect the build up of the game too much aside from defences being shit scared of him, so playing deeper & being more compact.
Alvarez has made a solid start & had a brilliant World Cup, & provides top backup/competition for Haaland. In actual fact, there were a couple of matches this season where Alvarez would have been preferable to Haaland, because we needed more industry upfront & someone who could attack from deep & wide.
Akanji's made a top class start to his City career, albeit I think he had by far his poorest for us against Liverpool.
Philips arrived recovering from injury, then got injured again, recovered & got injured twice more. Making the World Cup squad was a promising development even though he hardly played. HOWEVER, I'm seriously pissed that he's arrived back from the WC out of condition! It's bang out of order & puts more stress on Rodri who's barely rested over the last 2 seasons. Hopefully 2023 will see a full reset of Philips' Manchester City career.
Gomez has been disappointing. He's had a couple of decent & promising performances up until his sending off against Copenhagen, but it seems Pep's lost faith in him since. Defensively, he's our weakest defender outside of JWE, which presents ANOTHER big Left Back problem we can do without.
Rico Lewis has been the big surprise this season, which eases the full back pressure, but in the biggest games, we're still depending on Stones, Akanji, Aké & Laporté as FB cover in the absence of Walker or Cancelo which is still us trying to fit square pegs in round holes.
Our priorities must be to finally settle our LB issues, replace Gundog in Midfield & to start looking at another Winger. Gomez was a CFG chance we took which so far hasn't worked out, & Philips has never really got going.
1-11 we'll compete with any team on the planet, but it's the quality of 12-20 that will determine our season. We seriously need Philips & Gomez to step up & be counted, sooner rather than later. We really need them both fit & performing.