Can’t even say it wasn’t thoroughly deserved, if anything the score line could have been more favourable to them and that’s without them even being particularly good. And the worst thing about it was it was entirely predictable pre-match.
That midfield trio simply does not work. there’s zero energy, tempo or movement off the ball and as a result you get slow ponderous football with no end product because everybody wants to be on the ball doing the same thing leaving nobody to actually pass to in a threatening position.
Rodri gundogan and silva are the 3 controllers in the midfield, they come deeper to pick the ball up, link play and generally play with everything infront of them. Fernandinho, kdb bernardo and Foden are the ones that bring the movement and energy into the side, they play more on the half turn and will get into more advanced and more dangerous positions, you need a mix of the two for us to play well. playing two from the first group is a risk unless you’ve got exceptional movement on the outside i.e sterling and Sane, but playing 3 is asking for trouble. We’ve had warning signs over it before and it doesn’t take a David Moyes to see it so it’s a complete mystery to me why Pep continues with it.
Then We’ve got two right footers on the left flank and a left footer on the right which condenses the pitch significantly, combine that with a midfield with no energy and movement and It suddenly becomes an easy training exercise for their defence with the only legitimate threat coming from crosses and when it’s Aguero vs 3 giant cb’s with nothing but poor floated balls to deal with its slippers time for them.
The defence has been decimated by injuries and a horrendous lack of foresight in the summer, you can make legitimate excuses for how bad they are, you can’t say the same for our attack though and it’s the attack that failed just as much if not more than the defence today.
As for the defence, The less said about otamendi the better. you knew before it happened he was going to dive in, miss everything and leave us exposed because we’ve seen it countless times before, he’s a liability and he never learns. all he had to do was show the defender outside and stay with him, it’s the most basic art of defending and he’s utterly incapable of doing it, he’s genuinely one of the worst 1v1 defenders in the entire league and we expect our defenders to excel in that area.
The worrying thing is, this isn’t a one-off bad day at the office scenario, we’ve got Stones to add to this and that’s it, we’re stuck with it until January at the very least and starting from November onwards we’ve got a vastly more difficult set of fixtures than we’ve had so far this season. The first ten games were where we was supposed to be building a nice cushion at the top of the league ahead of a nasty looking winter period.
Wonder how many of those people insisting we didn’t need a cb in the summer would still stand by that ridiculous comment.