Manchester City is living a real nightmare. The team led by Pep Guardiola has ceased to be a perfectly oiled machine and has become, in a very short time, a vulnerable team, incapable of generating scoring chances and accumulating failures in the Premier League, one after another. A group of footballers, reduced by losses, has gone from being the leader to occupying fourth position without winning up to four consecutive games and seeing direct rivals in the fight for the title, such as Arsenal or Liverpool, open a gap in the standings. These are the lowest hours for the triplet champion, a team unaccustomed to this type of crisis.
«They were better than us and we did not manage to create danger for them. It’s my job to find a way to turn this situation around. “During all these years we always found a way to win games, but now we are suffering,” admitted Guardiola after his team’s defeat in Birmingham against Aston Villa. The Catalan coach put words to a stubborn reality that was reflected on the Villa Park grass. His team was unable to overcome a match in which at no time did they have control of the match. Unai Emery’s team was so superior that it generated up to 22 chances against Ederson’s goal, while the ‘citizens’ barely made two shots, none of them between the sticks. Never had Guardiola’s team received so many shots.
It was the grayest day for a European champion who has lost punch in the last month and has done so, nothing more and nothing less, than against major rivals, those who by budget and tradition should be in the fight for the title. qualification. They drew three games in a row against Chelsea (4-4), Liverpool (1-1) and Tottenham (3-3) in three games in which Guardiola’s men often went on a roller coaster that could have fallen for either of them. sides, a rare avis for a team characterized by dominating games and conditioning an opponent often harassed by endless possessions of the ball. In those duels we could already see a vulnerable team, with difficulties defending in transition and with a less populated wardrobe than usual. Guardiola looks at the bench and, now, there are no longer solutions to intervene in games. Kovacic, Rico Lewis and company are still not the stars that previously populated the team’s core.
This is because Manchester City has lost the players who made it have Pep Guardiola’s DNA. Last year, the former Barça and Bayern coach had a core team made up of Gündogan, De Bruyne, Rodri and, often, Bernardo Silva, who joined from the right-handed profile to generate superiority. Pieces have now been falling off in that plot. The first went to Barça, the second continues to have physical problems since the beginning of the season and the third has an increasingly worrying dependency.
City wins 73.3% of their games with Rodri and 53% without him. He receives more scoring chances when he is not there, generates less and has made even Guardiola treat his absence as a major issue. “He is fantastic, the best in Europe, but we have to learn to win without him,” he acknowledged on Tuesday after the last absence of the ’16’. City is going through its worst period, but it will return, as Guardiola assures. “We are going to win the Premier,” says the one from Sampedor.
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