“He adapted quickly, but many times in the previous seasons we played with a false nine and had an extra player in the middle. Now the extra player is in the box, so we have to adjust something.”
In that one answer, Pep Guardiola brought everything together. There has been a debate raging about Manchester City’s style of play and Guardiola’s selection choices of late, and it all boils down to incorporating Erling Haaland into the well-oiled machine.
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Those who know Guardiola say he has been trying since the start of the season to get the best out of Haaland without breaking the false nine-led system that, over the past two years, has delivered back-to-back Premier League titles and a Champions League final (and almost a second).
In this context, Guardiola has two types of players in his squad: the ‘pausa’ players, who manage the rhythm of the game, and the destabilising players, who are more geared towards attacking.
His control players include Rodri, Ilkay Gundogan, Bernardo Silva, Jack Grealish and Riyad Mahrez. His destabilisers include Haaland, Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Joao Cancelo and Julian Alvarez.
Guardiola’s line-ups, going back to Barcelona and Bayern Munich, have always been about finding the right balance and at the mid-point of the 2020-21 season, he found a winning formula with City that oozed control — and it did not involve a traditional striker. Introducing Haaland to the team is one of the two main reasons City are at the mid-point of this season still trying to find their rhythm (the other one is the World Cup break).
As Guardiola said, City are basically trying to play with the same level of control as the past two seasons, even though their ‘extra man’ is now terrorising defenders rather than linking up play in midfield.
Right now, there is arguably a more pressing issue. As Ilkay Gundogan said in midweek, “Something’s off”. “At the minute there’s a special recipe missing — performances, the desire and hunger is not as in recent years,” he said following the extremely poor defeat at Southampton in the Carabao Cup.
Guardiola was pleased with City’s performance in the 1-1 draw with Everton, and said they were “alive” after beating Chelsea in the FA Cup last weekend, but they were ropey against Chelsea in the league last week and even worse against Southampton, where he said that no matter which team he picked, he had the feeling the outcome would have been the same.
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Gundogan hopes that the defeat to Southampton is a “wake-up call”, and it quite possibly will be. Either way, getting players back to their best — physically and mentally — after the World Cup has been an ongoing battle.
That is at the root of their current bad patch, stretching back over the past fortnight, but the broader picture, one that has been relevant since the start of the season — and will continue to be as long as Haaland and Guardiola are at the club — is how everything fits together.
Despite recent form, neither Haaland nor City are doing too badly out of this adaptation period. With 27 goals in 22 games in all competitions, the Norwegian has exceeded all expectations. Even those who argued in the summer that he would need a little bit of time to find his feet have been made to look stupid: he scored twice on his league debut and has barely stopped since.
Although recent games have been alarming, City are certainly no worse off than they were this time last season — in the Premier League they have won more games and scored more goals than at the same stage. They qualified top of their Champions League group and are still in the FA Cup.
The fact remains that Guardiola has been looking for answers all season and still is now (while contending with the World Cup hangover). Those close to him believe he is getting closer and closer to cracking it, but this is a new City to that of the past two seasons. In that sense, they have taken a small step backwards in the hope of taking a giant leap forward.
The debate around their style of play, which is often slow by design, existed before the results started to suffer of late. The concerns, then, have not always been about the results — it is about the performances.
Guardiola has tried many different ways to rediscover the control of last season, with recent games a perfect example of that.
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There are numerous ways he looks for control and it’s not always as obvious as what team he picks — a player’s instructions can change from one minute to the next and different partnerships can have different outcomes — but perhaps the most obvious option, probably his go-to one and the most controversial in the stands and on social media, is playing Grealish and Mahrez out wide.
He has come to favour those two because they both excel in four particular areas: they stay open on the wings, they press with intensity, they rarely lose the ball and they understand when to speed the game up and when to slow it down (the ‘pausa’ element).
And it cannot be stressed enough how important slowing down the game is to Guardiola.
“We should spend more time in the final third, give more passes in that moment,” Guardiola said after the chaotic 3-3 draw at Newcastle earlier this season. In that game, City had been attacking quickly and directly, but that was seen as part of their problem.
“But it’s difficult because Erling is going, Phil has this aggression to go,” Guardiola continued. “If Jack plays there or Riyad or Bernardo play on the right, they are calmer and they help us to be all together, and when we lose the ball we are there and they cannot run.”
If City attack spaces quickly and they score (or at least the ball goes out of play), they either don’t have to regroup quickly or they get the opportunity to do so. The problem against Newcastle was that the moves either broke down or the shots were saved and stayed in play, allowing Eddie Howe’s team to counter-attack. Because City had attacked so quickly, the midfielders and defenders did not have time to catch up and get in the right position to try to win the ball back.
This was yet another reminder to Guardiola of the importance of control.
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If there is a chance to attack quickly he encourages it but there are strict instructions not to force it.
In fact, once Guardiola leaves City and his reign and career are looked at in totality, it will probably become clear that he has become more conservative in recent years.
If this were in the Marvel universe, the origin story of this shift in approach would be chaotic defeats and/or Champions League eliminations at the hands of Liverpool and Tottenham between 2017 and 2020, and others in this period, where things got out of hand and City suffered on the counter-attack.
He wanted to put a stop to that and the false-nine system of early 2021 not only moved City out of their relative slump around Liverpool winning the title, but it also gave City the control Guardiola wanted and delivered trophies and progress in Europe.
City lost to Real Madrid in the Champions League semi-final last season after losing control for three or four minutes at the end of normal time in the second leg. Guardiola’s reaction to that was not to look for less control — by throwing caution to the wind — but to seek more. The Newcastle game is another example, while the final 20 minutes of the 6-3 Manchester derby win in October, when United scored twice, is another.
Guardiola would always be happier with a balanced game that City don’t win than an unbalanced game that they do.
There have been calls for Guardiola to embrace the attacking quality in his team, to let Haaland, Foden, De Bruyne et al off the leash and wreak havoc, and they would surely win games that way. Guardiola is not that way inclined. He believes that how City played earlier in his reign, with Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane on the wings, would not be as successful now because teams defend against them in different ways, limiting the spaces for these kinds of direct wingers.
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Grealish and Mahrez are generally used against deep defences because they have different gears to their game and know when to play fast and when to play slow, but Guardiola is constantly looking for new ways to find control.
The starting XI against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge last week, although it did not contain either player, was an attempt to find the perfect balance in a different way.
It included Foden, who has often missed out recently (although fitness concerns around the World Cup have also contributed to that) wide on the left, Cancelo wide on the right, Haaland in the middle and four midfielders behind them. It didn’t work — Guardiola made changes at half-time and later brought on Grealish and Mahrez after an hour — but it was an attempt to get the right balance in a completely different way.
And that was the case again on Sunday when City played Chelsea in the FA Cup. Foden played in midfield this time, something which has long been mooted but rarely seen. The balancing act was to surround him with ‘pausa’ players: he was partnered by Bernardo, who has developed that understanding in recent years, and backed up by Rodri, Kyle Walker, Sergio Gomez and Aymeric Laporte — players capable of combining to play multiple short passes. It was the same at Southampton, where Foden was partnered by Gundogan, Mr Pausa.
That Southampton game, and Gundogan’s comments afterwards, show that other factors are at play right now, from fitness to attitude.
But in recent weeks Guardiola has come in for more criticism than usual. Depending on your perspective, he is either harnessing the vast attacking talents of Foden, De Bruyne and Haaland, or hampering them.
What works for the manager — and what delivers results — has not always been particularly enjoyable to watch and fans have been yearning for something more thrilling of late. It must be said that Guardiola is more than happy with those ‘duller’ games as long as City win, but he is looking for new ways to do it every game. More exciting solutions might, in theory, be around the corner — although City fans would surely take victory at Old Trafford with Grealish and Mahrez slowing the game down to glacial pace.
Right now, the effects of the World Cup loom large over City, but the story of the season so far has been Guardiola’s attempts to retain the same control over matches as in seasons gone by, but in completely different ways. No wonder they look a bit different.
