Pep Guardiola has been getting a good kicking all week for his decisions surrounding Manchester City’s 4-0 hiding on his return to Barcelona, with his policy of employing a goalkeeper who could play with his feet predictably biting him on the backside and the gamble of leaving Sergio Agüero on the bench not really working out to anyone’s satisfaction.
Yet oddly City played well at Camp Nou. Until Claudio Bravo’s dismissal changed the character of the game they were still in contention and even with 10 men there was nothing timid or nervous about their display.
While Guardiola could not have been happy with the result, the performance contained a lot of positives. City no longer look like imposters in Europe. They will be disappointed with the slips and mistakes that left Lionel Messi with one of his easier hat-tricks but they gave Barcelona a workout for an hour and, though the final score was unflattering, a first defeat in Europe does not make qualification impossible.
It all depends on how well City bounce back, not just from Barcelona but from the four-match winless sequence that began when they were unexpectedly held at Celtic. The process begins today at home to Southampton, a routine enough Premier League fixture in ordinary circumstances but now one fraught with the dangers of extending their wobble to five matches or beginning a slide down the table after starting the season with six wins.
“It will be anything but an easy game for us,” Ilkay Gundogan says. “Lots of big teams seem to struggle against Southampton, I have been impressed by the way they have started the season. We are playing at home, though, and, if we can play the sort of football we played against Everton, we can all be happy again.”
The uninitiated might guess from that remark that Everton had been one of the high points of City’s season to date, a particularly impressive win or a game studded with memorable goals. In fact it was a 1-1 draw, City’s first dropped points at the Etihad, a muted response to defeat at Spurs two weeks before and a game in which Vincent Kompany came on late to be sent up front in search of a goal. Yet Gundogan was not mistaken. City played well against Everton and did more than enough to win the game, as they surely would have done had either Kevin De Bruyne or Agüero been able to beat Maarten Stekelenburg from the penalty spot.
The temptation at the time was to shrug and suggest Guardiola’s education was just beginning. How typically City to eschew not one but two penalties at home in a game in which they were completely dominant. Yet, now stories are emerging of a deteriorating relationship between Guardiola and Agüero, the events of the past week can be cast in a subtly different light.
Agüero began on the bench against Everton too. It was imagined he was being rested for the Barcelona game, having just returned from international duty in South America. But, unless Guardiola made up his mind about the team to play in Camp Nou very late, subsequent events shed doubt on the theory.
The manager had explained on an earlier occasion that he was looking for more from his striker, apparently not content with 11 goals in eight games, so it could easily be that Agüero was disgruntled by his treatment and not in the ideal frame of mind when he came on for the last half-hour against Everton.
He is likely to be even less gruntled about being given 11 minutes in Barcelona when the game had gone, and it is possible that Guardiola’s micro-management techniques are beginning to have undesired effects.
If the coach imagined Kelechi Iheanacho would step into the breach against Everton and give Agüero something to think about, he was wrong. For almost an hour City’s attack lacked a point of real focus and, though barely able to get hold of the ball themselves Everton were able to hold out on their own six-yard line because their opponents did not have a reliable finisher.
The same was true against Barcelona. City were never on top to the same extent, nothing like it, but they did set up some promising situations when there was only one goal in the game and Agüero is precisely the sort of player one would normally choose to make the most of limited chances.
Presumably Agüero will return against Southampton. For all their spending City actually have few other options up front, though his performance and body language will be closely scrutinised.
So will that of Bravo. Guardiola expects him to carry on playing in the same way, though the goalkeeper himself is bound to be nervous about leaving his area or playing with his feet. Right from the time Guardiola declared that to be a deficiency in Joe Hart’s game his replacement has seemed keen to prove his ability on the ground, sometimes using his feet when catching or picking up the ball would have made more sense, and he has not proved the greatest advertisement for Guardiola’s assessment of what makes a good goalkeeper.
Bravo was lucky not to be sent off in the Manchester derby for a lunging tackle on Wayne Rooney and his double error in Barcelona was almost laughable in its naivety. Guardiola simply cannot be serious if he really wants him to carry on in the same way and his own authority will soon be undermined if any more mistakes are made.
The City manager has pressing problems at the front and back of his team and to an extent they are both of his own making. The good news is that everything in between appears to be working just fine.
