Okay. So How Bad Is It Really?
According to widespread media reporting – from Talksport to the dailies to Sunday Supplement/SSN and so on – we are having a dreadful start to the season. On Sunday, Dzeko saved Mancini from ‘humiliation’ according to the Mail. Andy Dunn wrote in the Mirror not long ago about Mancini cracking up under the pressure. Alan Hansen regularly points out City’s failings on MOTD. So you don’t really have to look very far for evidence that the season is already going pear shaped and could be a write-off before too long if our league form stutters. Your non-blue mates – if you have them – are probably quick to agree with the media on this. As Adrian Chiles regularly points out, all that money and we are falling apart at the seams.
Except that when you actually watch City game in game out, as most of us do, the picture the media paints doesn’t quite tally with what we are seeing in front of us. In fairness, anyone who is not a fan of our beloved blues has probably had no greater exposure to our season than we have to say Liverpool’s season so far or Stoke’s. You see/hear what is said in the media, you watch them when they are playing City, you see maybe the highlights on MOTD and you might watch the odd Saturday teatime game while your dear partner spends two hours getting ready before you go out for the evening. Not, in other words, really enough to make an informed judgment on how well or badly the team in question is doing.
So with the season a quarter of the way through, there is probably enough water under the bridge for us to look at some comparisons with last season, to see if it really is all doom and gloom. Is it as bad as large sections of the media would have us believe?
There are several points of comparison with last year that bear scrutiny. I start with a straight comparison of the first 11 fixtures last year and this. Here are the first 11 games from each season.
2011/12 2012/13
Swansea (h) 4-0 Southampton (h) 3-2
Bolton (a) 3-2 Liverpool (a) 2-2
Spurs (a) 5-1 QPR (h) 3-1
Wigan (h) 3-0 Stoke (a) 1-1
Fulham (a) 2-2 Arsenal (h) 1-1
Everton (h) 2-0 Fulham (a) 2-1
Blackburn (a) 4-0 Sunderland (h) 3-0
Villa (h) 4-1 West Brom (a) 2-1
Rags (a) 6-1 (fucking ay) Swansea (h) 1-0
Wolves (h) 3-1 West Ham (a) 0-0
Newcastle (h) 3-1 Spurs (h) 2-1
The points tally from last season’s first 11 games was 31 points out of 33, this season it is 25 out of 33. Last season’s first 11 games saw us score 39 goals and concede 9. This season we have scored 20 goals and conceded 10. This season we have not scored more than three goals and have only scored three goals in a game on three occasions. Last season, there were only two games in the first 11 when we didn’t score three or more. So the stats confirm what we all know anyway, which is that we have made a good start this season but last year we started like a train. That is why we are now 2 points behind the rags, not 5 points clear of them.
I wondered whether this year’s fixture list was tougher than last season’s, but I think the answer is that it is not noticeably any easier or any tougher either. Last season’s first 11 games included 6 against teams who finished in the bottom half of the table, including the three teams who would eventually go down. Of the teams we have played this year, QPR and Southampton look down already, but none of the others do to me. That said, this time last year we had already played 3 clubs out of the 4 other clubs who would finish in the top 5, this time we have played I think only one team who IMHO will achieve a top 5 finish (because I doubt that Spurs and Arsenal will both do it). So I think the fixture list for the first 11 games is not on the whole significantly better nor significantly worse than last season’s.
There are some distinctly worrying signs this season, it must be said. This year we have been behind in 6 games out of 11. After eleven games last season we were yet to be behind at any stage in any league game. The free-flowing football of last season has not been completely absent, but has been a lot less noticeable than this time last year. Not many of us think we are back (yet) to our free flowing best: Sunday was encouraging, but the finishing was woeful. We aren’t putting chances away with anything like the efficiency of last season.
Worse, we are conceding a lot of goals from dead balls – 6 out of 10 in the league (to say nothing of Europe, of which more below). Even when we did concede last season, of the 9 goals we let in during those first 11 games, 5 of them came when we were already leading by three clear goals with fewer than 15 minutes left to play: so last year our defence got sloppy when we were 3-0 up and cruising. This year, our defence has just been sloppy.
Yet all is not doom and gloom, as the media would have us believe. Another way of comparing last year’s performance with this season’s is a direct comparison with last season’s fixtures against the same opposition. We have so far played 9 league games against teams we played last season. What follows is a simple last season/this season comparison of the corresponding fixtures (home or away):
Liverpool (a) 1-1 2-2
QPR (h) 3-2 3-1
Stoke (a) 1-1 1-1
Arsenal (h) 1-0 1-1
Fulham (a) 2-2 2-1
Sunderland (h) 3-3 3-0
West Brom (a) 0-0 2-1
Swansea (h) 4-0 1-0
Spurs (h) 3-2 2-1
This comparison is far more encouraging. The points tally from those games last season is 17, this year it is 21. Only against Arsenal at home have we not matched or improved upon last year’s result. Frustrating draws at Fulham and WBA have been replaced by wins. The disappointing draw at home to Sunderland has been replaced with the sort of result we expected when we played them last time. Last year’s goal tally in these fixtures reads 18 for 11 against, this year’s fixtures read 17 for, 8 against. We have conceded more than one goal only once (in the league) this season, whereas last year we conceded more than one on four separate occasions in the same fixtures. We didn’t win at Liverpool or Stoke this season, but we didn’t win there last season either, or season before that (or the one before that).
So the direct game-for-game comparison is not at all disheartening. We have actually improved more than a shade on last year based on these fixtures. And if we look at the two games this season we have played against promoted clubs, the position is no different. We drew 0-0 away at West Ham – not dissimilar to the results last year at Swansea or West Brom and at home we have beaten Southampton, just as we beat each of the promoted clubs last season.
It is interesting also to compare how we have performed in different phases or ‘moments’ of the game. Last season, we went behind only on ten occasions during the whole season, but once we were behind it was only five times out of ten that we got anything out of the game. To put the same point another way, when the other side scored first there was a fifty-fifty chance that we would lose the game. This season, we have gone behind in the league on six occasions already (So’ton, Liverpool, Stoke, Fulham, WBA, Spurs) but have still got at least a point out of the game every single time, and on four occasions we have gone on to win the game having fallen behind. So four games in eleven have involved us taking maximum points from a losing position. We only managed that three times during the whole of last season (against QPR (h and a) and Chelsea (h)).
Another similar improvement relates to late winners. Last season, we scored late winners only twice –against Spurs (Balotelli’s penalty) and another one which I'm sorry but I can’t quite remember [ ;) ] whereas this year we have scored a winner with less than ten minutes of normal time to play four times already, including Dzeko’s winner on Sunday. Last season, we conceded late winners four times (at Chelsea, Sunderland, Swansea and Arsenal) and of the 29 goals we conceded last season, 18 of them were scored against us in the last 30 minutes of the game. This season, we have conceded 6 (out of 11) goals in the last 30 minutes but none of them have been late winners, and only against Arsenal has conceding a late goal actually cost us points. We have not conceded a goal in the last five minutes of any game in the league this season.
You might think from this that our resilience to avoid conceding late on in games, our ability to win from behind and our ability to fight on until the 95th minute and still grab a winner has improved significantly since last season – thanks in no small part I would think to that incredible five minutes in May. Whether or not that’s right, the stats do indicate a greater resilience, at least in the league, a greater mental toughness than in past seasons. If you’re reading this thinking ‘you know what, on the whole I preferred it when we were 3-0 up with 20 minutes to go’ then by God I agree with you, but we have been told for donkey’s years that the ‘never say die’ attitude at the swamp is what makes them champions, and it is satisfying to watch our own team develop a similar attitude right before our eyes.
Injuries have been a problem for us this year - Sergio Aguero lasted 8 minutes before injury put him out for a month. This time last year he had scored 10 goals, this time he has scored 3. David Silva has only just returned from injury (and didn’t we miss him). Injuries to Micah Richards, Gareth Barry, Joleon Lescott and many others have been a problem, compounded by one or two below par performances from VK, Balo and some others. Granted, last year we had the Tevez saga which in many respects was as good as an injury, but for the first part of the season we had few injury worries, which is at least in part why we put so many teams to the sword. I find it no coincidence that we dominated Spurs on Sunday once we had Silva, Tevez, Yaya and Aguero back on the same pitch together.
Another point is that last season, we were still something of an unknown quantity. Nobody expected us to put 5 past spuds or 6 past the rags on their own patch. Teams were not sure in those early months of the season how best to play us. This season, we are the champions (it still feels good writing that). Things are different. We are still winning our home games, but it is by one or two goals, rather than by 3 or 4. Tactically, this season, we have made life difficult for ourselves also, not least by experimenting with the back 4 (or 3) the results of which have been uninspiring. On the other hand, for the first time on Sunday playing with two attacking wing backs and 3 at the back really worked – maybe it was something that needed to bed in before we were comfortable with it.
The refereeing debate also strikes me as being relevant. Last season it was not until after the 6-1 that we really started to get the wrong end of some appalling refereeing decisions. So looking at the first 11 games largely ignores the impact of refereeing which we felt across the middle and latter parts of the season. Last season, Clattenberg made a balls up of the game at Fulham (the only one of our first 11 we didn’t win) but other than that, refereeing was pretty good for the first part of the season. This season, once again we have been on the wrong end of some shockers – Halsey awarding the non-penalty at Fulham, Sunday’s appalling display, Crouch’s basketball goal at Stoke. Fortunately that hasn’t affected the outcome of many games, but when you get so many wrong decisions as, for instance Foy made when refereeing us against QPR in August, or Michael Oliver did on Sunday, it is barely a surprise that we aren’t winning more handsomely.
None of this is to say the season so far is an unqualified success. Far from it. The cup competitions have been greatly disappointing. Although the Capital One Cup was, let’s face it, our 4th priority for the season, it has stuck in the throat that we have lost in the semis twice in the last 3 seasons and I would like to see us win this competition before too long. Europe continues to be a problem, and few now expect us to progress beyond the group stage. But this year’s group is if anything tougher than last year’s. The toughest group ever? I dunno. But whichever way the group had panned out, the last 16 of the “champions” league would have not featured the champions of any two of England, Germany Spain or Holland (even though it may feature the second best team in Greece). And that’s before legitimate goals are wrongly ruled out for offside or stonewall penalties are not given.
I think it is worth remembering how close we came in Madrid. Had we held on for another five minutes, who knows how the rest of the group phase might have developed. As it is, I am writing off the CL this season, sorry to say, and we will need to see how we can improve next season – and hope the draw is kinder. Our absolute priority for this season, however, is not winning the league, or qualifying for the knockout stages of the champions league; our “we have got to achieve this” target is surely qualification for next year’s champions league and we are well on target to achieve that. Not winning a trophy would be disappointing but not an absolute disaster – not qualifying for the CL (this year of all years) would be. The longer we keep qualifying for that tournament, the more we will start to ‘get’ it. Teams like Spurs and Arsenal are going to find that missing out on a CL place now that FFP has landed is a very expensive mistake to make.
So all in all, is our season imploding already, as many in the media suggest? Are we having a crisis? Well we aren’t flying in the league the way we did last season, but we aren’t exactly having a mare – in fact the comparisons with last year can be as promising or unpromising as you care to make them. We have in some respects done better than last season, as we have achieved some improved results in the teeth of more cautious opposition, difficult refereeing displays and a serious number of injuries to important members of the squad. Since last season is reckoned by many to be our best ever, it isn’t a bad comparison to be able to make. We seem to have a stronger mentality in this moment, as Bobby might put it. We haven’t won the title this season yet – nobody does in November – but we are a long way from being out of it, too.
All of which makes me think that what we read in the media about being a club in crisis is either hysteria borne of ignorance, or is working to some other agenda.
But that’s another story ;)
