It's definitely a legitimate concern. Until this season, I was never worried about us getting comprehensively beat. Even up against Barcelona or Bayern, you knew it'd be a tight game. But this season we're getting beaten by much larger margins by much worse teams. Liverpool are a thoroughly average team. They should be scraping a 1-0 win against us if anything. In the season where liverpool "won" the title, they had a period of the game where they hammered us and went into a 2-0 lead, but we still managed to pull 2 goals back and make a game of it. I've approached every game with City until recently with the assumption that the only possible results are a win, draw or narrow loss, but this season, it's been awful. I dunno if it's that we're making more mistakes, or whether we're simply not reacting to conceding in the same way. Pellegrini seems to have very little tactical variation. His attitude to every game seems to be "if we play well, we'll win" with little consideration for the strengths of the opponents or the state of the squad. He talked about the players being tired (an excuse we've heard before), but in that case did he alter the game plan to take that into account? Or did he just set up the same way with the same "exhausted" players and expect them to put the same sort of shift in that they did in the Ukraine or at Wembley? I'm no tactician, but even I know that some styles of play demand more physically than others, and it would stand to reason that you should play one of the less demanding styles when you have a packed schedule.
