It's Pep, and has been for a while.
Sending out teams with no consistent plan, shorn of putting players in their natural positions.
We have one of the greatest strikers in the world and consistently fail to play close enough to him for him to receive the ball in front of goal.
That's on Pep. Kev is slowing down at a rate of knots but there is nobody else who is able to create.
We are struggling for identity and leaders.
Can't fault Grealish and Ake application today.
It's absolutely criminal we have failed to address the lack of creativity and pace in the team.
It isn’t. It’s a common pattern in the PL over the last 10 years. Teams which win the league tend to struggle the year after.
We’ve probably done well to retain the title (x2) during this modern era. Utd the last other team to retain in 2009.
People have short memories but we were even worse 19/20. We were 20 points off Liverpool at this same stage. Exact same issues with everyone off their game and people slagging off Pep.
Here’s the trend:
City 2012 - Miles off an average (by Utd standards) team. Mancini sacked.
United won it 2013 - next year disaster - Moyes sacked.
City 2014 - miles off Chelsea year after.
Chelsea 2015 - next season disaster - Jose sacked
Leicester 2016 - next season disaster - Ranieri sacked
Chelsea 2017 - crap season. conte sacked
City 2019 - Miles off Liverpool the year after. People blame Pep. Say some players are finished.
Liverpool 2020 - got 4th on the last day the year after after being near unbeatable the year before.
We’ve won it back to back (again) and going through the same issues. I reckon the margins are so fine at top level sport if you drop off 5% it’s the difference between winning and losing. We’ve got several players who have dropped off, are injured or Pep is pissed off with them. It all combines to = what we see in the pattern above.
