Neville Kneville
Well-Known Member
I understand your position, I really do because as Pep calls it our defensive "stability" comes from retaining possession. In the traditional sense however, I don't think anyone would agree that losing possession is a defensive mistake. It's a bit ambiguous because our style is so different to most other teams, we play in areas most teams are scared of playing in and as a result we occasionally gift a goal to the opposition. Acceptable risks because they create so much at the other end when we get it right, which is most of the time.
But, Pep mentions many times, about controlling the counter attacks. Now if we control the counter attacks, then the opposition only have a few limited areas to potentially hurt us & we can then work specifically on those areas, to rule out almost all avenues of danger.
But if we can't control the counter attacks, then keeping possession actually becomes our main defensive asset.
I actually think that describes City currently. We don't concede many goals, because we are great at attacking & keeping possession. As soon as that underperforms slightly, we lose, because we can't defend.
When we actually try to start a game playing solid, we are often quite decent at it, as a team.
But we are currently not good enough defensively, to play the way Pep wants to play, mainly down to the drop in quality of our back 4 & def mid.
Which is hopefully whete the transfer window kicks in.