Anyone read the article in the Atlantic about our weak left side defense? Curious to hear people’s thoughts. I’ll copy and paste the article here as I know it’s behind a paywall. (I didn’t include the full article as the examples are pretty picture based). Josko is never ever going to be mentioned without his price I assume.
Sorry this is painfully long.
Article text:
It’s an old law of storytelling that the more powerful the character or obstacle, the more it needs some small, sort of ridiculous flaw to keep hope alive. Achilles had his heel. The Death Star had that exhaust port.
Manchester City, football’s own destroyer of worlds, have… a rear wheel gone slightly wobbly on the left side of their defence?
It’s not much to hang a game plan on. Even in their injury-depleted state, Pep Guardiola’s band of mecha warriors are the toughest team to score against in the
Premier League. If there was one easy trick to beat them, they wouldn’t have gone almost five years without losing back-to-back league games. But they
did just lose — twice! — to
Wolves and then
Arsenal, and if you look closely, there seems to be an early consensus shaping up about where to take a swing at this season’s version of the team that won the treble only four months ago.
Much more than in the previous five seasons, opponents are now attacking up their right side — City’s left.
The graphic above shows where City’s opponents attempt passes, compared to each zone’s average across the past six Premier League seasons. In 2021-22 and 2022-23, you could see the midfield turning blue as Guardiola dialled down his team’s high press to stay close in the middle, allowing opponents to play the ball around their own pinkish third instead.
This season, a new pattern is emerging: teams are steering their possession from left to right, putting all their chips on red to attack one particular corner of City’s defence. The shift has been strikingly consistent across a full third of the pitch.
As you’d probably expect, a lot of that traffic is coming from long balls — mostly diagonals — hit over the top of City’s compact mid-block defence. Teams have always tried to do that kind of thing against them, but never with this much success. Compared to the first eight games of other Premier League campaigns, City have allowed more long passes to their left flank this season (29) than last season (11) and the one before that (16) combined.
This isn’t happening on the other flank and it’s not just some accident resulting from playing a bunch of right-side-dominant teams in a row. When City’s eight opponents have faced other teams, they’ve passed about the same amount in both directions. It’s only when they meet City that everyone suddenly leans long to the right.
City’s lavishly expensive new left/centre-back,
Josko Gvardiol, is a finalist for the 2023 Ballon d’Or and is often called the best young defender in the world. His minutes have mostly come at the expense of the less heralded
Nathan Ake and everyone agrees that either one of those guys is a better defender than City’s left-back before them,
Joao Cancelo. Somehow the club keep upgrading that side of their defence but get worse.
One problem may be Gvardiol’s sheer confidence as a defender. He spent the past two years with
Germany’s
RB Leipzig, where players are often taught to “forecheck”, or jump in front of an opponent to cut out an anticipated pass. It’s an aggressive technique that works well when the whole team are pressing together, but a defender who closes down too much in isolation is liable to get turned by an attacker’s double move — dropping to the ball and then sprinting in behind.
Historically, the left-back and left centre-back only account for about half a team’s defensive actions in that part of the pitch. Another chunk of a side’s ball-winning usually comes from the defensive and central midfielders, but that has dried up for City this season, with
Rodri serving a three-game ban (which covered those two defeats) and
Ilkay Gundogan gone to
Barcelona. Their replacements, especially
Mateo Kovacic, tend to be skilled ball-handlers who lack the same defensive bite and long experience in Guardiola’s system.
Speaking of a lack of experience, nobody has been picked on more than 21-year-old
Jeremy Doku, a dribbling specialist fresh from France’s Ligue 1 who has been asked to slot in for the low-key defensively excellent
Jack Grealish. You can practically see the motherboard overheating as Doku tries to work out his precise positions, triggers and angles in City’s intricate pressing schemes in live time.
