IT'S NO DAVID AND GOLIATH

City’s mastery or Chelsea’s lethargy? Joseph Connolly unpicks the numbers behind the Blues’ 1-0 defeat at the Etihad.

On March 4, 2008, the football players of Manchester City F.C. would’ve been gearing up for a Premier League clash against Reading that they weren’t guaranteed to even get a point from. They’d played out a lacklustre scoreless draw with Wigan at home the previous weekend. Then they lost that game to Reading 2-0.

Fast forward ten years and Manchester City sit top of the Premier League, as they have done since the 5^th week of the season, having just beaten Chelsea 1-0 at home to place the proverbial ‘one foot in the door’ to securing their fifth first division title.

Manchester City players celebrating in 2008

      Manchester City players celebrating in 2008

We’ve been here before so many times this season. Search the internet and you’ll find thousands upon thousands of articles attempting to gauge whether this is ‘the best football team we’ve ever seen’. It’s fair to say that after eight months of football, the jury has returned a pretty sweeping verdict on that.

City, apart from their stumble at Anfield, have steamrolled nigh on anything that’s entered their path this season. They are probably the best football team most of us have ever seen – better than the likes of 2011 Barcelona and 2002 Brazil. But the scoreline in the game against Chelsea may trick those who didn’t watch it as a starkly false representation of how this game, between two major European clubs, panned out on this rainy March evening in Manchester.

In fact, 1-0 is a pretty respectable scoreline. It’s one you’d expect from two teams of this calibre, with outstanding defensive capabilities on both sides of the field. But it isn’t reflective of how the game was played, right from the opening minute of the fixture.

Anybody who’s played football has been there. Coming up against the league leaders, the unbeatable side – it’s always a terrifying prospect. A game plan has to be forged. A marking system. A special, one-off formation for the game. Whether it’s 5-a-side or down at the park on a Sunday morning, coming up against a team with the reputation that Manchester City hold always gets the brain racing.

But the viewers of Sunday’s game would’ve seen something characteristically odd. Yes, Manchester City are a great team. And yes, they ended up victorious. But frankly, the game was a bore, a 90-minute drawl of what may as well have been a training exercise for City. ‘Attack-vs-defence’ was how Gary Neville referred to it.

Wait a minute, though. This is Chelsea we’re talking about here. Not Newcastle, or Swansea, or Bournemouth, or any team for that matter who you’d expect to set up defensively. Chelsea are the title holders, the champions, a team rife with international stars and experienced players. Yet they set out like a human wall, with no intentions of attacking. It was a hark back to the days of Jose Mourinho’s ‘park-the-bus’ strategy – that which became such a source of entertainment for Twitter users and football fans that it became a phenomenon – and a style of play – in itself.

So is this an example of Manchester City’s utter dominance – or Chelsea’s surrender before the game had even begun?

A video circulating on the internet highlights the extent of Chelsea's lack of effort. In this still, Fabregas and David Silva are both playing the game at walking pace.

A video circulating on the internet highlights the extent of Chelsea's lack of effort. In this still, Fabregas and David Silva are both playing the game at walking pace.

Conte’s hallmark 3-5-2 has worked so effectively for Chelsea in the past two seasons – but here it just seemed like an excuse for eight players to camp behind the ball, deflecting shots pelleted at them like riot shields. It was a real shock to see Chelsea enter a game as if they were a small time team – and play in the vague hope they could get a point rather than having any sort of belief that they could win. It was a sad sight to see such a giant playing with such a defeatist mindset and completely bereft of any character. There was no integrity to their gameplay, right from the off. In fact, there was hardly any gameplay at all.

Let’s not pretend Manchester City aren’t brilliant. Even in this banal, one-sided fixture (in which City hardly needed any moments of magic – Chelsea sat back and let them do their job), there were still moments of ornate brilliance. Little snippets of genius, like Leroy Sane’s glittering run in the first half from the left wing or David Silva’s twist and turn and eventual back heel lit up what was a frankly dull affair. Perhaps the most joyous spectacle of this Manchester City side’s magical gameplay is their empirical ability to retain possession even in the most compact of spaces.

To focus on Manchester City’s gloriousness for a while rather than the misery of Chelsea’s recent form, it may be natural to pick on the genius of players such as Silva, or Kevin de Bruyne, or Sergio Aguero as a possible explanation for their belief-defying performances this season. But despite their catalogue of fantastic players, Manchester City’s squad, while exceptionally talented, is not one that would immediately warrant the title of ‘best team ever’ – not least if you hadn’t had even seen them play beforehand.

Oleksandr Zinchenko

Kevin De Bruyne has rapidly established himself as one of the world’s best and Sergio Aguero has been at the top for a very long time, as has David Silva. Leroy Sane is a phenomenal young talent with bags of potential for a historic career. But the likes of John Stones, a hit-and-hope signing from Everton and Fabian Delph, an Aston Villa reject, are not what you’d traditionally call ‘world-class players’. Oleksandr Zinchenko is quickly favouring himself amongst City’s management and is becoming a first-team player – but he’s only 21 and has got a long way to go before he gets mentioned in any top 100 shortlists. Kyle Walker is a right back who, despite being signed for an extortionate cheque, has never been concretely regarded as England’s number-one right back amongst competition from Nathaniel Clyne. Fernandinho, Raheem Sterling, Aymeric Laporte – the list goes on of players who would be brushed onto a world XI team sheet with no second thought these days – but when they were signed, were no where near the best in their position.

So what’s the secret?

Pep Guardiola.

Pessimists will dismiss the influence of the football manager on the stature and ability of a team, especially in the era of sports science and analysts and celebrity players. Sometimes when watching a team who are that good (or that bad), you wouldn’t be dismissed for thinking no manager, however tactically adept, could change them.

But when watching this team, the age-old myth that is the influence of a football manager is blasted into dust. Or rather, it’s cemented and is proven to be true.

The accolade for ‘greatest manager of all time’ is not one that is customarily discussed – it’s a difficult one to pinpoint and statistics can always be countered with arguments of “he inherited a good side.” Yet, no-one is saying that Guardiola could lead Millwall to the Champions League (though there’s one for the computers) – but that the teams he has inherited he has vastly improved, and worked every player in the squad to his maximum ability – like wringing a cloth until not a drop of water remains.

Guardiola joined Brescia as a player in 2001

Remember that age-old argument that ‘Messi couldn’t do it without Xavi and Iniesta’? Well, despite the fact that everyone’s seemed to have forgotten about that and the fact that Messi has irrefutably proved that statement wrong, it’s actually rather usefully become an extended metaphor for an opposition fan to use against any half-decent football player. City’s arsenal of stars are all fantastic individuals, but they wouldn’t be able to do it alone.

That’s where Pep comes in. Every team he’s managed he’s transformed into a force of a nature, a team so revered that they go down in the history books. He’s set countless records and got a multitude of individual honours to match. There’s no reverse argument. Pep is and was the vital element to Barcelona’s, Bayern’s and now City’s unprecedented success when he was at the helm.

Single-handedly he has curated a style of play never before seen on a football pitch in the manner he plays it. He’s done the football equivalent of creating a new genre of music.

The catch is, he doesn’t need to adapt to his teams previous playing style, or the league he’s in. The team adapts to him, every time, without fail. He has made this Manchester City team his own; crafted and moulded them into what they are, like a potter smoothing out one of his finest porcelain creations. The quick-pressing and ball retrieval tactic married with his quintessential tiki-taka passing strategy is a Michelin-star combination. It’s just a surprise no-one’s properly learnt how to copy it yet.

Teams can’t get near the ball when City play like they do. But they’ve got a greatly lesser chance of getting near it when they don’t try at all ala Chelsea, today. City enjoyed 71% possession, whereas the Blues didn’t register a single shot on target. Embarassingly for the away side, City set a new record for the most passes attempted (and completed) in a game since statistics were first recorded in 2003-04.

From a fan’s perspective, it was a demoralising and humiliating loss – and for many, should spell the end of Conte’s era. Chelsea have lost four away games in a row for the first time in 15 years but needn’t have resigned to defeat so quickly in this one. They sat back from the very first minute – and that isn’t an exaggeration.

The sad part is, Conte admitted that he had pretty much resigned to losing before the game had even started.

“I am not so stupid to play open against Manchester City and lose three or four-nil.”

Chelsea have won just one of their past eight away games

From a Chelsea fans perspective, such a comment is distasteful and simply not something you hear from the manager of a club that has built a legacy over the past fifteen years. How can a team attempting to retain the Premier League title look at a team and decide that the best game plan is to try and concede as few goals as possible? Or that losing is a feasible option? How can any team do that?

There were chances for Chelsea to show their mettle at points in this game, but the players looked like they were acquiescing in Conte’s setup just as much as the manager had to defeat from the word go.

Sitting back can be the best option at times, but when Chelsea had opportunity to break they simply slowed play down. Their passes were nonchalant and lacklustre. None of them looked like they wanted to be on the field. It was like a FIFA game they would rather have simulated, or a class presentation they went first in, just to get it over and done with.

Of course, they can’t see the game from the air like the fans or the pundits can. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that there’s going to space up-field when four City players are surrounding the ball in the Chelsea half after an attack breaks down. Pass after pass after pass went backwards, and then pass after pass after pass went astray. It’s almost like they thought they needn’t try and make the pass a good one cause they were going to lose anyway.

Chelsea had their fair share of breaks, but every time they did, a poorly weighted through ball let them down. Pedro was a major let down as was Cesc Fabregas. Everything was wrong from Chelsea and it was one of the most miserable performances from a team anyone will see for a long time.

There were long throws to Eden Hazard who’d have to challenge Laporte or Otamendi in the air. He was isolated upfront. Azpilicueta punted the ball up on multiple occasions in the bizarre hope that somebody would latch onto it, with ten of the team still stationed in the defensive half. Antonio Rudiger played at least two dismal back-passes to Thibaut Courtois, which the Belgian subsequently let roll to within a millimetre of rolling out for a corner before slicing the ball out for a City throw. It was painful to watch.

The thing is, for all City’s genius, Chelsea let them have it easy today. Sitting back and defending is all well and good but after a while, they will find a way to break you down. One mistake, like Christensen made today, is enough. Even when there isn’t a mistake, one shimmering, sugar-laced pass from Kevin de Bruyne could part the Red Sea, never mind a three-man defence. The lazy passing and was a vision of the fact that after the goal, Chelsea simply gave up.

A late flurry of substitutions in a faint-hearted attempt to salvage something from the game was in vain, as Olivier Giroud and Alvaro Morata did little to affect the game. The fact that the pair were introduced at all beckons the question of why Conte didn’t start either, but instead opted with the same system of Eden Hazard up front. It’s the same sytem he employed in both the 3-0 loss to Bournemouth and the 4-1 loss to Watford. It’s proven to not work – and today he had two trade strikers ready and available.

But that question is just another one to add to the pile stocking up against Antonio Conte and what he’s still doing at this cherished football club. The Italian hasn’t got long left and if he wants to stay, he’s got to change something.

Yes, City were great, again. But the damning verdict from this one is not that City are the greatest ever, or that Guardiola is a genius. The damning verdict from this one is that Antonio Conte needs to go.