Sometimes things in football just happen. The most extraordinary victories can be achieved by teams whose tactical schemes have slipped, forgotten, from practicality within a few minutes of kick-off. Everybody has a plan until Raheem Sterling runs in behind.
As Manchester City prepare for the arrival of Chelsea on Sunday, the temptation is to go back to that Saturday evening in December when Maurizio Sarri’s side became the first to beat Pep Guardiola’s in the league this season. What did he do then to unsettle the league champions?
To which the answer is: not much. Sarri himself was honest about that after the game. He had meant to press City, to rattle them as his Napoli side twice had in the Champions League in 2017-18. City ended up winning home and away, but both matches had been thrilling and in neither had they looked comfortable. This is the gamblers’ approach, the one favored (most of the time) by Jürgen Klopp: try to impose yourself, press them high up the pitch, make City’s defenders work at stopping you. The strategy risks being caught on the counter but it also has the best chance of exposing City’s one real vulnerability: defending.
But Chelsea did not do that. City pressed remarkably well. Fernandinho, playing higher than usual, stifled Jorginho and, as City kept winning the ball back high up the pitch, they kept generating five-on-four breaks. The front three of Sterling, operating as a false nine, flanked by Riyad Mahrez and Leroy Sané, had the pace and movement to create chances, but the absence of a calculating finisher of the quality of Sergio Agüero, who was injured, perhaps prevented them taking full advantage.
Having little option, Chelsea dropped deeper. Without space to attack behind the defensive line, City found it harder to create opportunities. Mahrez drifted off the left to a more central role, presumably in part so he could sit on Jorginho so Fernandinho was not sucked too far from his position protecting the heart of City’s defense. That, in turn, denied David Luiz a simple short pass to his playmaker in midfield, and so he was forced to look long.
There are legitimate doubts about David Luiz’s defensive capacities, particularly in a back four, but his long-range passing is exceptional. One such ball out to Pedro just before half-time hit City at their weakest point. As Louis van Gaal pointed out, the greatest vulnerability of Guardiola teams is (or at least was; there has since been evidence of a change of approach) their habit of pushing both full-backs forward simultaneously. That created the opening, as Pedro laid in Willian who had got behind Kyle Walker, and N’Golo Kanté, having found space between the attacking and defensive bands of City’s side, seized the opportunity.
The second half took a very different pattern. City seemed weirdly flat – the first indication of a problem that would recur when they came under pressure against Crystal Palace, Leicester and Newcastle – and Chelsea seemed more consciously to look to use long passes in behind Fabian Delph, Kanté linking up repeatedly with Pedro on the right.
Which tells us what for Sunday? Perhaps most telling is the fact that Chelsea do not have to press high to win games. Sarri is notably intransigent, insisting on trying to play his way whatever the circumstances but this, surely, is an occasion for compromise. Certainly he cannot risk allowing City the sort of freedom they had in the first 20 minutes of the meeting at Stamford Bridge when Fernandinho overwhelmed Jorginho – and may also recall that when his Napoli lost 2-1 at the Etihad in 2017, it was City’s opening blitz that did for them.
There will be obvious differences from the game at Stamford Bridge. Both then played with a false nine; with Agüero fit and in form for City and Gonzalo Higuaín arrived at Chelsea from Milan, neither is likely to on Sunday. But the issue of City’s full-backs remains an intriguing one – particularly because that is an area where Guardiola, who in his public pronouncements at least can seem at times just as inflexible as Sarri, has begun to reconsider.
Aymeric Laporte can get forward – as he did to set up City’s first-minute goal against Arsenal last Sunday, – but he is a natural center-back and so far more defensively reliable than Benjamin Mendy, who is injured anyway, or Delph. He can tuck in at left-back, becoming a third central defender in effect when City have the ball, which in turn gives Walker license to get forward on the right. Given how adept David Luiz is at that long sweeping diagonal from left to right, it seems reasonable to expect Laporte to operate as a relatively defensive left-back to caution against the sort of move that brought Chelsea such joy in that game in December.
There are lessons from that first meeting, of course, but the idea Sarri had a masterplan for City that brought success is misleading. Rather his side were fortunate early on and then had the wit to adapt to circumstances – which does not sound much like Sarriball at all. But then it does not sound much like City either.
The Guardian Sport
