Nasri's surprising stats vs Silva

[City_Sean]

Im a big nasri fan, it'll be interesting to see how he gets on this season, hoping Jovetic pushes him hard

 

[LHarper]

So in this 4-3-3 system I take it if Silva was playing that he'd be on the wing or is he out altogether?

He would come in from the left - Jovetic will be doing the same. He won't be out wide much in the style of someone like Navas. I'm not sure what Pellegrini's formation is going to be for majority of games - 4-2-3-1 probably, unless the Txiki is insistent on the 4-3-3 that they are implementing in the academy.

You're quite correct that if the full backs joined the attack that it would leave us exposed to the ball over the top and the swift counter-attack, but this is what is increasingly happening to us now anyway and why I suggested more creativity in forward positions and that the defenders stay put in the main.

Also, if you were providing the analysis to Newcastle on Monday night and City were set up as I suggested but the defenders were to stay put and only support when absolutely necessary, in your professional capacity how would you advise Newcastle as to the best way to negate and counteract us?

So although we would have a winger in Navas widening the play, Newcastle would likely play a 4-5-1, with someone who's job it is to drop in and disrupt whoever is the registá (in our case, Nasri). A bank of 4 and 5 across the pitch limiting space in behind and in between - very difficult to do for 90 minutes and that's why a lot of our games were 0-0 at half time but we would score more in the second half as the opposition started to get some peripheral and central fatigue. Yaya does a great job of linking play from deep as not only has he got great vision he's also got great awareness and is calm on the ball.

And yes please I'd love to know how performance analysis is recorded in a match situation. I mean do you just concentrate one player for that match or one team or both? The only way I could see it was to have an army of scientists sat there monitoring every player individually. Also if every Premiership game was on the same day, you'd need 220+ scientists to analyse every players progress and that doesn't count someone weighing up all the possession stats either.

Also, what about the discrepancies in performance data? I've seen different oragnisations analyse the same match and come up with sometimes wildly differing stats. How and why does that happen?

Are the stats 100% accurate and does anyone analyse the analysis?

City are one of the best in the country for using performance analysis across the whole club and this video is worth a watch for what happens on a match day:

http://www.mcfc.co.uk/citytv/Features/2011/September/Performance-analysis-II?play=1

Advanced computer programs are used for stats and so depending on the way they've been programmed, different constituents of a match may be 'viewed' differently by the system in place. If you give me an example or 2 of stats you've seen that are quite different from one place to the next then I might be able to give you a specific reason why.

I would say generally though that the analysis systems in place are very valid and reliable.