And welcome to the double pivot the world's most agreeable soccer Alex podcast. I am Michael Kaley We are back and the premier league is back and there's only one story that anyone is talking about Manchester City are in crisis That's right. We have a new sound effect and of course This is the only topic anyone's talk because they really have lost five all comps three league matches in a row Pep Guardiola's job is in danger. They are in second place in the table Hmm join on my Goodman gonna talk this through how you doing?
You can come watch us post on blue sky a bunch now we do that. I am going to post a link to this on blue sky and More people will see it than they do on XV everything. I'm gonna keep doing my banking on XV everything up Obviously, but you know for sharing social media stuff. It's just make more sense to do it on blue ski Yeah, we're not just talking about Manchester City's five game losing streak because spurs are responsible for 40% of it But we're not talking about it because of that It's a weird situation Let's let's contextualize a little bit here five game losing streak is like Fire territory for any team that thinks of itself as a very good team whether that's Manchester City You like you know who thinks of themselves as rightfully so as they should be the best in the world It would be like a major concern Right and what's happened in the league matches here at least the League Cup lost to spurs That was kind of a bit more of the classic spurs win over man City but Against Tottenham against Bournemouth against Brighton They gave up a whole bunch of chances and while eight goals is a lot to concede from those chances They gave up a whole bunch of chances and the hallmark of people are your teams has been that that doesn't happen now They got a bunch of chances themselves in those games You know a world where they win draw and lose these three is just not that different from the world that we're living in right now But the thing is and then they would be four points behind Liverpool instead of eight and they would feel like they were In less of a crisis the thing is though Their performance in the games before these five matches which we talked about this podcast I would like to like pat ourselves on the back a little bit for this if you were watching the underlying numbers before the cold streak You would have been saying as we were city look legitimately worse But maybe it won't matter because they're gonna keep running hot and instead literally the opposite happened Yeah, it is quite reasonable to look at the stats across these five games and say it's really unlikely that they lost all five These games the problem is is that you go back to the five games before that which they won all of and you would look at those five wins And you are also forced to say Ha kind of unlikely that they would have won all five of these games And that's what we kept saying was different and so I am not like I am not super apt to look at their bad Run of luck across these five games and look at it as it Allaying my concerns about Manchester City rather I do think it's a little bit quirky the way the last ten games or so have been distributed points wise but the underlying performances are Absolutely cause for alarm But as you also said like cause for alarm in Manchester City Maybe the question to ask is how many teams would trade their performances for cause for alarm Manchester City's Are we talking eight?
Are we talking eleven? Are we talking fourteen? Like exactly how bad does Manchester City cause for alarm make that right? Because man City have failed to win the Premier League title in the Pep Guardiola era the once twice There was the first year and then the year correct he has that first season where like things are not great They are a really good top four team He's doing stuff like inverting Bakari Sonia into midfield And he's realizing that he doesn't have Philip Lam and he can't just run his his same tactics out It's a really a full adjustment season and takes one adjustment season and then they are fully operational for just short of a decade And there is really only one season in there where they aren't obviously the best team by the underlying numbers It's not the season that they didn't win the title like they are they are never There has not been a season where if you discount the table and you look at the XG You could not make a very reasonable case or in most cases just make the obvious case that they're the best team And so man City in the Pep era being in crisis is a different kind of thing on the other hand Like the reason that everyone picked them to win the title this season is because everyone assumes that that will continue it Not continuing is like a big story.
Yeah, look I mean, I think that over the last 10 games they've played as an above average team But basically as a borderline champions in qualifying team And that's that's like a serious dislocation from where they were and I think we've talked about some reasons before But I think it's worth reiterating that to me. There's there's two very distinct things going on The defensive side of the ball is just obvious Roger is injured and they have absolutely no cover Maybe and we've been saying this now for two months Pep Guardiola will eventually magic up a solution, but as of now There there is just there is no solution there. They're not they have not two things They have not replaced Roger in any meaningful way and they have not really changed how they play in a recognition of the fact that they can't replace Roger they're just giving up a lot more counter-attacks right up the guy and That's been a hallmark of a thing that they haven't allowed forever and how they allow it there's a sort of knock-on effect here Which is that pep has been reacting to a Number of different things did this the last season too It's I have to do with with de Broina being out as well Where he's pushing his fullbacks into attack quite a bit more whether it's playing something look like a narrow three three three Or something like a narrow four two three one Guardiola is getting into the penalty area a lot is you know tied for a second on the team and goals even Walker is getting forward from right back And I think that as much as Rodry not cleaning up in midfield is an issue It is also that he often doesn't have an extra guy back He all those guys are often tracking back and making plays coming back to the ball instead of being there supporting midfield and defense And they're getting forward because the attack isn't quite working So I feel like there's it really sort of comes from both sides of the ball I I agree with that a lot of the I also feel like I have one major point to make in the attack But this a secondary point here is also Roger one of the things that Roger's flexibility lets you do is move One of the five guys into attack, but it oftentimes being like it could be any of the box in a very real way and without Roger being the legend of that it's a much more basic simple full-backs and Now I'll get to the other attack point, which is they're like Everything still goes through everything everything everything still goes well Which I guess if you're playing the old way that Roger was a little bit of it makes a ton of sense Why would you want somebody not who is not holland taking a shot when that shot could be taken by Holland? But in a system in which the full-backs are pushing forward more and they are Like having wide attackers flanking Holland with the idea of spacing the fields who give Holland room in the box Like is much less applicable they need they should be in theory Contributing more in the final third if the full-backs are now the ones providing the way And they're not and it is still all running through Holland with more full-backs up the field The winger is not really giving you a ton no de broina The eights sort of being constrained because the defense the counter-attacking defense is a mess, but also just like Behold like the you know or the phone who's having a terrible year So you put that all together and it's it's Manchester City crisis and I think that the like the eights not getting into because as you say if you have your full-backs get forward Your winners stay wide you've got Holland in the center Well, who's making those runs in the half-space of second man third man runs in the penalty or whatever they are you know Good no one was I think signed to do that.
He's 34. I mean he's clearly the guy the two years ago Did that mm-hmm right he was the guy who it wasn't Holland was getting not only into the 18 But like into the six It is not clear to me He's supposed to be doing that now is unable to because again You're missing Roger and what are you doing with all of the midfielders to make up for that because like we have come It's just not run true So it wouldn't surprise me if you were telling me that good one was supposed to be Like more reserved and more to the point even two years ago What are the things that we talked about with City and their immense degree of control is that well Gonna get forward and score goals. He was always behind the ball He was getting to the six it was because the ball was at the by like he was always behind the ball So if you're getting the ball to the by line less Then not gonna back to that is gonna want being further up the field now That's it 34. So the fact that he's further up the field is not actually preventing counter attacks either Yeah, and if your fullbacks are pushing up a lot of what you end up doing is inverting your winners in theory In practice they're not getting very much from that Right because the thing is that the if you invert your wingers and like you're still not sending vario to the byline Like pep's not right to doing the full 2014 style four two three one four three three stuff with his fullbacks The fullbacks instead get up to the edge of the 18 and occasionally into the 18 But not to the byline and you're doing that while you're also inverting your wingers And then they're not getting the byline either like it really gets clogged up in some spaces that like it's weird because I am describing Technical problems in an attack that surely pep or the other sees and is balancing out something else in some way But like I don't understand why I keep seeing it Stuff is breaking down and when stuff is breaking down there are a number of what avenues you could go In a similar situation to this if somebody else was the manager if it was happening at some other team We would be talking about tactical failures from the manager.
These ideas are not working Like it's like excuse from that discussion. I'm sure somewhere there are some people who will be mad at me for saying that Who will you know really have been waiting like 15 years to be to tell you? I told you so for all you look but like it's been 15 years dude Guerrilla gets excused from that conversation. So I'm left thinking of two different but interconnected things one is basically like we're looking for solutions here and Whatever we are see like the things we are trying are not working and two is I know the solution I want I'm having trouble getting players to effectively execute that solution and obviously there's some overlap there between those two possibilities And of course the synthesis is like I don't have the players I need to fix the problems that we've got which is something that we have been raising concerns about for a while now But like we kept saying like you keep stretching this you keep stretching this you keep stretching this eventually The cracks in the fissures will be too big for peppercornio to paper over with his tactics everybody is constrained by talent in the end And that's what this looks like to me.
It's exactly what it looks like to me And the you know you could say we talked about this before like why didn't they go and get like at least one full Back who is a full back because one thing they did in building this team to the very precise Specifications of the sort of perfected three-guy attack of De Bruyne a Holland and Greelish Was go and get center backs to play full back and guys who were properly center backs defensively and big wise But could play out wide and help move the ball up the field But the biggest thing that they are obviously missing is Raheem Sterling Leroy's on a Riyadh marrez wingers who score goals and they didn't try to get single one of those and To the extent that they had one of them and Phil phone He's now playing internally and further from ball and to the extent that they had two of them only an Alvarez Which like that's a little bit of an argument to the definition of what Alvarez does do he certainly scores goals So the scores goals and I sort of think in this season. That's how he would have been deployed Where he's still in team. They still didn't replace it. So, you know, not only have they moved fully away from like those guys who were on the roster and not replaced them They've actively went out and got another different profile of winger to replace the minutes, right?
They went out and they got doku they went out and they went out and they got cevino is a little bit of exaggeration, but like cleaned Yes, but clearly the intent was those are the guys that we want Greelish doku and cevino are the guys that we want on this squad in those positions and like that's a very clear profile of Guys who play wide and move the ball into the box for somebody else all of them. That's what they all do and Look to some degree. I get it man Like if you can have holiday shot you would rather have all the dick that shot than anybody else But if you have constructed a machine that is so specific to that goal And then a couple of parts break down and you have enough money to have fail safe system should you so choose the fact that you choose Not to is a decision. It's a strategic choice.
Yeah, it just looks like a team that was precision-tooled to do one thing and as such not built to adapt to relatively minor problems Yes to relatively minor problems, but like and it's facing relatively major problems Last year they space relatively minor problems and didn't really adapt but were able to break away Not go through it without too much of a problem when they had Alvarez and when you know this year the problems are bigger and so they have Created not gonna affect problems all over the place with all or it was like, you know one of the things you're talking about is you know, why didn't they go and get a full-back, right? and I suspect one answer they could have given you is we have a full-back if we want to play with the traditional full-back in Kyle Walker and As it turns out at this point in his career Kyle Walker may be a fast center back playing full-back Then when you ask him to hit top speed three times a game to cover that's great And if you ask him to run up and down the field that his age the entire game You're not getting good Kyle Walker anymore plus he's been hurt which again old you should factor in these Possibilities, but I would absolutely say that like I would not be surprised if the plan was what are we hey Pap? What do we need to do if we need to use full-backs and the answer was what are you talking about? We have one of the best right backs in the game Conversation online earlier today about Holland and you know a significant part of what has happened certainly a big part What happened in the pot?
I mean he had seven shots positions and he's also Holland so a couple of those shots he took from not very good positions like we're rockets off of the Bar and he got seven shots against Brighton. He got five shots against born enough. So 19 shots in his last three matches for 3.1 XG in those three matches one goal that tiny little stretch over three matches is going to happen but man like one thing I would really say here is if The goal is to get Holland shots The fact that you get Holland seven shots in the team gets elected versus Holland getting five shots at the team gets 22 You would obviously have preferred to have the latter and you know I said like two or three times in the pocket so far like of course you would want Holland to take the shot Instead of somebody else if that was something you could engineer But how many shots do you want to sacrifice for each additional Holland shot is a really open question And I think when City are clicking on all cylinders getting Holland the ball doesn't constrain all of the other stuff But it sure seems to constrain it when they're facing these problems early Holland is not a like black hole of a striker Where you get him the ball and he's going to shoot correct early Holland is even for City He is a you can see how well-rounded his game is and for City He's playing a role which is asking him to really do one thing when he was a Dortmund He did a lot of stuff, but even in those in this role. He has typically been in the point one five point two expected assist per 90 He gets five eight assists per per season.
He could easily be feeding someone else some of these chances too There just isn't someone for him to do that to he just like gets the shots off And I will say this aspect of Guardiola This is not new over the years at the times when we've looked at Guardiola team struggling The thing that goes missing is the volume of shots almost always that like when those teams are firing on all cylinders They are getting great shots and the lots of shots But they're not necessarily getting more great shots And then when those teams start to struggle they do a decent job of keeping the great shots pretty elevated But everything else falls apart and so that you know, you know two shots for distance here three shots Offset pieces there are the kinds of things that fall away And as it turns out you really do need them both to be dominant And it's a little bit weird and interesting and persistently weird and interesting about Guardiola that Contra most teams in the world the thing that goes away is everything that is it the best set of shots But that's consistently what's happened and this is like just dramatically Like forty longer stretch of time and more so that's seem dynamic. Yeah, exactly We've seen this most classically sort of in their bad champions league runs Yeah, you get games you would get games like this They would get knocked out chance not that like they were again, you know Not like they were really bad But they would struggle and what would happen would be just super long stretches of nothing and one or two good chances that don't get Sort it and look, you know in the five games before the five games We saw this a lot where like they would be you know, they went like three games in a row where they came back from down a goal I think some numbers I know some numbers I'm guessing I think that's right. It's truthy But like for walls for example, they were down one Oh from like the tenth minute on and then they scored two very late goals to it And those two goals were great opportunities and there's only actually the end looks okay What you saw was long stretches of not very much and then those two really good chances at the end breakthrough and it's very indicative of like He will not sacrifice control while seeking great to like make up for and They are not sacrificing control and possession even now even with the defensive woes, but what's happening is Being in control the possession is also Not enough on the defensive side of the ball and that's like to me. That's kind of pure Roger.
Yeah And but that he's like if you were to say like what is pushing kind of scuffling struggles into like full-blown crisis territory That's where it is for me That's like the major difference between how we've seen them struggle before on the attacking side of the ball sometimes for a few kids here I'm up there to like you know boy. How do they pull out of this right because this is Worse a city since the Rogery injury I don't think I would want to go back over this But I would bet that other than maybe during his first season at city I don't know if there is a stretch of 10 games about 10 games What is the worst seven-game stretch pep has had by xg? I want to look at that. I think this might be it.
Yeah, it's either this or Two years ago Holland comes in and spends the first month and a half scoring for fun I mean they have a month and a half where they struggle Which is why they have to be perfect on the back half of the season and that's what I'm drawing a lot of the hey Like a lot of the information about what they look like when they struggle from is that period of time? It's and it is in some ways reminiscent but the other thing to keep in mind when you think about Rogery and Rogery's influence to show up the first season for Nintendo was still there and Rogery increasingly played with me before Nintendo was one of the setbacks You know it was it was not an abrupt transition It was a managed transition and you know to adapt the system to the differences in their case and right like the major difference is under Nintendo you could empty out the middle and attack and for Nd. You would just clean everything up in transition and pivot you into attack very quickly Whereas with Rogery you clog the middle, but because Rogery is tactically brilliant You can clog the middle and let him be the linchpin that lets a thousand different attacking overlaps You know right whether it's him or somebody else with him covering within a more populated structure Right and you can push fewer players forward because Rogery is going to find the past that makes like a 6v8 work Also because you don't know like where the you know instead of two guys pushing forward You're pushing forward one guy, but the opposition doesn't know which guy and from where so you're much more able tactically flexibly to kill to create limited overlaps because Defenses can't prepare right like defenses can't like shadow one side or the other or clog the middle because that's where the right Well, you often hear okay This this team wants to verse one overlaps on the outside or this team wants three verse two in the middle or whatever It is like to have the area of the field they have an advantage what city did at their peak was say No, like for ten minutes We might want to be one on the right for the next seven minutes We want 3v2 in the middle then we'll go back to the right and until and you can make those you could flex into any of those things From the five guys primarily because Rogery was underpinning it all right And I think that this goes to the sort of like perfectly machined tooled aspect of that team Yeah, because that team that's very best was I think the best football team I've ever seen it's reasonable I would like probably say some of the Barcelona the messy Barcelona seems but like Incredibly reasonable arguments make it's a fair point like you know Maybe having the best player of all time that is peakless was more important than so it was the most perfect football team I've ever watched yeah, and it was perfect because it wasn't that exciting It was perfect because you could do so much with Greelish and De Bruyne and Holland That you just add a little bit here or there and it would work and the other team would be stifled the entire match If Barcelona was Pep Guardiola figuring out how do you maximize messy and using lots of other great players to do it Manchester City is Pep Guardiola figuring out how to maximize Pep Guardiola's system with 11 guys You're getting the most out of 11 guys the idea was that nobody on that team sacrifices what they do best and that everybody gets put in a position to do their best by Pep Guardiola and Like when you conceive of it that way oh Getting guys who are good at getting the ball into the box and getting hollowed getting all the end of things in the box makes A tremendous amount of sense, but like you get really really handicapped all of a sudden by the overarching Ethos of what you're doing in a way that you wouldn't if you were approaching things somewhat differently Yeah, and what important point about that team was I keep saying Greelish but really Greelish and Maras split time They would have either Greelish or Maras as the winger in that three-man attack and they wanted to go crazy They could play both of them, but Maras and it's also Greelish at that age gave you a lot more in the penalty area than Savino and Dokudu They also had Voden coming off the bench as like the off-ball back-post running wing More and you know you could flex it in a number of ways you could put the Bernardo Silva up there If you wanted more of a possession type thing sort of doing the same like you had a lot of options Even as the ethos was quite clear all of those like Greelish becoming less of a shot getter using Bernardo Silva as a control tactical winger you know and Having Voden back off of that back post running off You know touches in the penalty area player into being us you know quasi 10 all of those lead to the team Having much less ability to do something other than the thing they are perfectly machine tool to do and now here We are and I think you know the broina goes down But Audrey doesn't Roger goes down with the broina doesn't you know? They have their full complement of center backs instead of like scrambling by with which whatever two were healthy in a given week All of these things mitigate Oscar Bob doesn't get her I guess like I mean I think that they thought he was gonna like step in and get rid of the attack and say In the back after the field not that I think we lose is that good But like if you're building and growing a team and part of your goal is at the end of the thing you get this set of minutes to the young Kids coming through to develop them like Oscar Bob is better than whatever like option you're left with in his absence so you do have like a real domino effect of injuries and You I suppose you could make the argument that at the time when Guardiola was going to have to flex to something else his ability to flex Was also constrained as well as the top-end talent loss But it's not like we're talking to you perhaps in those very deep to begin with you right We're already talking about the problems that come from one of their youth players getting injured or Mateo Kova chitch getting injured like shockingly Mateo Kova chitch can't play 90 minutes a hundred minutes every week This is just the way you've got this team But I think that we've talked through what we think is wrong and we've sort of bounced between this isn't that bad This is bad for city It's a little bit hard to I'd like to sort of try to lock it in somewhere like where do we think this team is?
Through the rest of the season and I'd say where do the team is the rest of the season if PEP doesn't have some new genius idea With this talent if the problem is that PEP is constrained by the squad that of course PEP has had a major hand in building If that's the problem and therefore there is not some magic version of city walking through that door where all of this works Exactly how bad is it am I assuming Kevin to play in a place a bunch of minutes or that he does He's gonna miss some games, but he's gonna play a bunch They're like worse than Liverpool and Arsenal, but probably somewhat better than Chelsea But that's that's why I put them exactly what I think that is what they have been since Roger he went down They'll probably get somewhat more from Foted in the end of DeBroyna combined then they have since Roger went down, but that's probably not as good as Liverpool and ourself Yeah, exactly and Seems of that Catholic upon the agency before I think they just have I mean Full is one that Premier League before I mean the other thing that I do think we should keep in mind here in this context is yes They are worse than Liverpool Arsenal, but also on an absolute scale Liverpool and Arsenal are somewhat worse than Premier League winners of previous years So it's a little bit of a down year at the very top of the Premier League for all sorts of intended reasons So the fact that they are like third behind the Premier League's two best teams is still really it is say something meaningful here Then being third between behind the two best teams just is meaningful like true They just kept winning the title and being the best team when they did it They're like yeah, but like Conceivably right you could imagine a world where Liverpool were on 100 point pace and also were on 97 point pace and we were saying Manchester City is third, but they're on a 95 point pace and like like we expected to finish with around 95 points and Yeah, it's meaningful that there were some of these two teams, but in a lot of years They still win the title. I think what we're saying now is somewhat more Is it somewhat bigger dip than that right? Yes, it is not caused by those two teams getting much better Right, and so like you know when I think of Manchester City I think of them right now is like an 80 385 point kind of caliber team and I think 83 and I think that like Arsenal and Liverpool are like an 85 to 87 inch range Which is like those are good teams But it's it's it's it's it's unquestionably a real dip so we are now 12 matches into the Premier League season like 14 matches in the La Liga They just keep playing games in Spain. We've got we've got a bunch of games done And so it's a really interesting time to take a look at player numbers You're starting to get meaningful samples a thousand minutes of play of play and there's some players who have made real changes Real steps forward or perhaps look like they're consolidating weird stuff So we are going to be doing a bunch of Musa Dembele podcasts this week where we are doing some player profiles Patreon comms left double pivot you can take a look at those new player profile podcast will be coming out shortly