Man City are playing like Southampton
EMIRATES — There are occasional times when you can still believe in this Manchester City team being what they once were.
Phil Foden and Bernardo Silva are dribbling around the final third, looking for the right pass rather than the first pass. Josko Gvardiol is high on the wing for long enough that you forget he’s a nominal full-back. Forwards are dipping into space and then dashing off.
During these minutes, it’s fascinating to watch Pep Guardiola because he stands perfectly still, only his eyes moving from side to side as the ball does the same. It is as if Guardiola is desperate not to nudge the natural order of things off its axis. To move would be to jinx it.
The rest of the time, Guardiola is as jittery and frantic as his team.
He flings out his arms like a teenager whose parents have banned him from having a party. He turns around in disgust in the overacting horror usually reserved for South America soap operas. He screams at people who have no chance of hearing him because the screaming itself is the only way to let the frustration dissipate.
City’s manager is never still for long when his team have the ball in their own half. If we judge the strongest teams by their weakest suit, City have a passing problem. To anyone accustomed to watching Guardiola’s teams suffocate and strangle opponents for the last 15 years, it is unfathomable.
There was something decidedly Southampton-like about City’s ball retention and decision-making for Arsenal’s goals; there is no greater insult this season.
Players who were used to playing the right pass play the wrong one. Players who were used to controlling and turning in one movement now do both a little too slow and invite pressure that they cannot deal with. It is all so very strange.
The answer, obviously, is to cut it out and go more direct. That is what we tell children, what we tell Sunday League defenders and what we tell players on TV when they dwell and dither.
But we can’t tell City players to do that and neither can Guardiola. His entire ethos, his tactical raison d’etre, is built around talented footballers inviting pressure from opponents before extricating themselves out of it. Without the pledge and the turn, there’s no prestige and no magic trick either.
So what happens? It keeps happening. Foden loses the ball in his own half and parity that took so much effort and guile to discover is gone again in an instant.
If it seems to you that City are being punished for their mistakes, that’s because the players aren’t used to committing them and so are slow to react. None of this feels real to them either.
They are too good for this to keep happening, is something that you hear an awful lot.
It’s probably right, eventually. Good players being good is less surprising than good players being shambolic. They will spend money to fix it and maybe they already have.
But all the while, our expectations and estimations of their 2024-25 season sprint away from where they were in August. This game marked the start of a run of matches in which City will be forced to face high-class opponents and sink or swim.
In the first of those they hit the bottom of the pool with a heavy thump.
They were dire. They were dismal. They were broken. They were nothing like we have seen before this season and everything like we have seen in other matches since October.
They ran into an elite team and, right not, they are not one.