da realbet： This weekend, Manchester City are in comeback mode.
da bet vitoria： For most of the season, it has felt as though Pep Guardiola’s side were the smart kid at school who always got all the answers right. When they finally got one wrong – and in some style – at Anfield on Wednesday evening, the humiliation in front of the rest of the class was that bit harsher. And the laughter from classmates, that bit more shrill.
Of course, it makes no sense to laugh at the smart kid’s mistake. She’s still much smarter than you are. But the rest of the Premier League took glee in it: that’s just how the playground works.
This weekend, though, City need to double down and get it right: not just to beat their near neighbours and seal the Premier League title at the earliest point in history, not just to remind the world that this is a special side, but to boost morale ahead of an unlikely comeback on Tuesday night.
If any side can do it, it’s City you’d think. A a 3-0 lead is not insurmountable, but the Blues’ lack of an away goal will severely hamper them – especially against a side who have already proved they can score heavily and quickly against them.
It raises many questions. Like, what do Liverpool do: they have their own derby this weekend, can they rest players? And when Tuesday does finally come around, do they sit deep or try for an early and crucial away goal?
For City, it’s most existential: what on earth happened? And can they overcome their deficit?
The second one is the most simple to answer: they don’t have any choice other than to try – this should be a liberating experience. The first one is harder.
Asking where City went wrong at Anfield is hard because it was a case of Liverpool being too good as much as it was about the visitors being bad. And yet, when you look at Pep Guardiola’s starting XI you see two very clear and obvious mistakes.
Mistakes in personnel were, in hindsight, playing Aymeric Laporte at left-back and dropping Raheem Sterling in favour of Ilkay Gundogan.
Laporte didn’t play at left-back but rather as a left-sided centre-back, whilst Gundogan wasn’t a like-for-like Sterling replacement as much as he was a ploy to get another midfielder on the pitch.
They were tactical calls which backfired thanks the to lop-sided formation it invoked.
They were also borne out of fear: fear of Liverpool’s front three, and of Mohamed Salah in particular.
That’s worrying: why should Guardiola, whose team is 16 points clear at the top of the Premier League table fear anyone? Sure, Salah and co are magnificent and arguably the best front three in the world on current form, but City should believe they’re 18 points clear of Liverpool (with a game in hand) for a reason.
But perhaps it wasn’t just fear alone that prompted the reactive personnel choice. Maybe it was arrogance, too.
All season long onlookers have commented on how fluid City have been, and how each player could almost play in any position. They know their tactical instructions, and they are good enough to implement them under any and all circumstances, or so it seemed. When Benjamin Mendy suffered his injury, Fabian Delph and Oleksandr Zinchenko deputised as though they were both second-choice full-backs rather than repurposed midfielders or wingers.
That might have led Guardiola to believe that the fluidity he’d built into his squad was enough for him to pick such a strangely asymmetrical in what was the biggest game of his entire season and against a team he already feared.
In attempting to stop Salah, Guardiola picked the most complicated formation he could possibly have foisted on his players, who duly messed it up. ‘Back to basics’ was the cry from the critics last season when the Catalan’s approach didn’t work but he soldiered on and moulded his unsuccessful system into a well-oiled machine this year. But he went too far on Wednesday night.
As a result, City are in comeback mode and Guardiola – the smartest kid in the class – can’t afford another complicated mistake.
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