admin Manchester City have yet to maintain the form that saw them win the treble last season, but this team is in a very different place.
Pep Roulette is an idiom that has entered the football dictionary in recent years to refer to Pep Guardiola’s rotation policy.
Every Manchester City player knows that he can be sent off at any time, no matter how well he plays, because the manager wants something else for particular opponents , whether he’s giving everyone a break before the upcoming tests or he’s impressed by someone else. Be on the team. Trying to predict Guardiola’s line-up can make those cryptic crossword puzzles a bit of a relief.
During a season, coaches will use some players more than others. At a time when City are targeting the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League, it is almost guaranteed that at least eight players will start each major match and often up to 10 players.
Comparing the players Guardiola used most last season with the players he turned to the most says a lot about why the performances were so different. Erling Haaland is the only foreign player to make the top three on both lists, joining Rodri and Ilkay Gundogan last season and this year Kyle Walker and Julian Alvarez.
Walker and Alvarez did not crack the top 10 last season, and only five names at the start of this season also played a significant role last season: Haaland, Rodri, Manu Akanji, Nathan Ake and Ruben Dias. . Of the remaining five, Gundogan and Riyad Mahrez are gone, Kevin De Bruyne is out long-term while Bernardo Silva and Jack Grealish have both seen their campaigns hampered by injury.
This means there are five new names in the top 10 this season: Walker, Alvarez, Phil Foden, Mateo Kovacic and Josko Gvardiol.You could say that Foden, Alvarez and Kovacic cover Grealish, De Bruyne and Gundogan, but swapping Mahrez and Silva for Walker and Gvardiol would take away a lot of the team’s creativity.
Even the group’s new creation is new. There’s been a lot of talk about Haaland being left out of recent matches, but it’s no surprise that he doesn’t seem to get along with his team-mates when given the opportunity to play with them. really busy. offered it last season.
If you’re looking for reasons why Haaland hasn’t scored many goals, or why Everton have created better scoring chances than Man City so far, there’s no continuity in the four attacking roles between n°6 and n°9 can explain a lot of things. There are obviously other factors at play, but it’s not hard to see why City over the past few months have not looked like the team that won the treble.
