Balancing risk and reward may be City’s biggest challenge

The problem with excellence is how commonplace it can quickly come to feel. How long, you wonder, before the question becomes less whether Manchester City will retain the title, than whether they might this time be able to manage an unbeaten season, whether last season’s record of 100 points may be in jeopardy.

How long before it begins to seem that their season, as was true for Pep Guardiola’s entire reign at Bayern Munich and for much of it at Barcelona, will be defined by a couple of games in the knockout stages of the Champions League?

City’s victory against Arsenal on Sunday felt utterly run-of-the-mill, just as their victory against Chelsea in the Community Shield had. That is two of the other members of the putative Big Six brushed aside in consecutive games, neither at home, without City really being tested.

For the Premier League, as a competitive entity, that is ominous. It is true Chelsea and Arsenal were in their first competitive (-ish, in the case of the Community Shield) games under new managers. Both are teams set up to press, the sort of sides who may, in theory, be able to do what Liverpool did last season and unsettle City. And while it is true the patterns of play that allow them to operate like that take time to instil, it is also true neither team ever looked like laying a glove on City.

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And look at the players City did not have in their starting lineup: Vincent Kompany, Nicolás Otamendi, Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Leroy Sané and Gabriel Jesus were all on the bench. David Silva and Fabian Delph were back in Manchester. Any of those eight could slot in without weakening the side and, at a conservative estimate, in at least three cases they would manifestly strengthen it.

No waste

As their rivals like to point out, City have spent a lot of money but they have – at least recently – spent it well. There is no waste there, no £30 million embarrassment shunted out of sight – which is what happens when a club has a coherent vision from top to bottom, when players are signed to a plan rather than dashing about in the hours before the transfer window closes, shouting the names of centre-backs and prices into the air in the hope something will stick.

It is one of the fascinations of football that what is ostensibly a strength can under pressure become a weakness

What hope, then, for the rest of the league? There is the obvious caveat that, for all the ease of City’s win, this was one league game. Guardiola’s first season in England began with 10 successive victories. The assumption then was City were strolling to the title, only for rhythm to be lost in six winless games that began with a 3-3 draw against Celtic. Mood and morale can change quickly and perhaps particularly so at a club like City, in which the system is king.

It is one of the fascinations of football that what is ostensibly a strength – the philosophy that imbues the club with coherence – can under pressure become a weakness, personality sublimated to the system so that when a leader is needed nobody any longer has the individuality to grab a game and wrench it back to order.

More structurally, there remains a question at full-back. That there are times when both advance simultaneously gives City great width through midfield and enhances their pressing, but inevitably there is a corollary, which is that the triangle of the two central defenders plus the deep-lying midfielder can be stretched. Confident or aggressive sides may be able to exploit that in the way Liverpool did last season.

Exaggerated

The issue was exaggerated on Sunday by the fact City set up with a pair of inverted wingers, Raheem Sterling cutting in from the left and Riyad Mahrez from the right, which meant the width on which Guardiola insists had to be provided by the full-backs.

The plan was clearly effective: it was not just that Sterling, the diffidence that so often afflicts him at the vital moment in an England shirt so much reduced for City, scored the first goal after opening up space for a right-foot shot with a dart along the top of the box, or that the second was lashed in by Bernardo Silva from a Benjamin Mendy cross – it was the way Mendy and Kyle Walker overlapped constantly. No one in the game completed more key passes than the left-back Mendy, no one more dribbles than the right-back Walker.

But that does come at a cost and already it feels as though balancing risk and reward may be the major challenge for City this season: the openness that makes them so efficient in beating the majority of Premier League sides may be precisely what renders them vulnerable against the very best. And if this season does follow last season in becoming a procession, it is in those games against the elite that City and Guardiola will be judged.

– Guardian