The game and the result were extremely unlucky; how many chances did Leverkusen have apart from the goals, maybe one or two?
Absolutely everything fell their way plus a huge amount of luck, while we had a huge amount of bad luck. It’s not just about XG, it’s about the countless exchanges we had in the box, the loose balls that, sometimes purely out of bad luck, didn’t turn into a goal or a direct threat. That escapes XG, but it’s still part of reality and of the probability of a given result in a match. It was practically the same with Newcastle, where in my opinion there was no real symmetry – away at a really tough ground we were, overall, the better team, we had much better chances; at the very least Foden (from Cherki’s pass) and Haaland twice (from Doku’s pass when Pope came out, and from O’Reilly’s pass when he hit Pope) had to score, plus there were no cards for obvious fouls and no penalties given, including the obvious one on Foden.
The rebuild is ongoing and on the right track. Structurally we look decent, we’re able to attack quicker. Pep and the staff aren’t going to put the ball in the net themselves. We’re playing in a way that creates chances. The players just need to be more efficient, period.
We need Rodri, we need a few players in much better form. But they won’t get into better form without playing. That’s why Pep decided that at home against Leverkusen, with our overall situation in the UCL being pretty good, we’d cope and that it was necessary to let the reserves play. It’s about their form, but also their morale. And their morale, as part of the team, affects the whole team. A football team is an organism – complex, because it’s made up of many people. On top of that, a special kind of people: top-class specialists in their profession with big egos. You have to manage that constantly, day in, day out, to keep them stimulated. City are fighting and will keep fighting on all fronts, the whole squad has to be ready for battle, even at the cost of slip-up defeats like yesterday’s.
The reward will be that over time Omar Marmoush or Khusanov or others will look better, and that could be crucial. Yesterday Bobb already played pretty well; examples like that will keep multiplying, we have a high-quality squad. The sadness is understandable, it’s a second defeat in a row, but the reasons for the loss are clear to me – it will get better.
