this is what happens when tactical Evolution backfires Manchester City a team that won silverware last season is on the brink of Crisis the strange part is it's not just because the players aren't playing well it's because two of Pep guardiola's biggest strengths have become his biggest weakness the first issue is obvious when you look at this collection of players all great players and more importantly all have mastered the art of playing as a deep single pivot and this is the first mistake pep made when he joined the Club he had Yaya T and fernandinho at
his disposal and this evolved to rodri and fernandinho with initially rodri being backup to the Brazilian before they switched roles as fernandinho began to age out and then fernandinho departed and the chaos began because in the years since his departure Calvin Phillips has been the only dedicated holding midfielder that has been brought in maybe pep saw something in training or he was never on board with signing the Englishman but Phillips was never given a real opportunity meaning rodri continued to play every minute of every game not only increasing their Reliance on him but also the
minutes in his legs and now pep is paying his debt for those minutes as rodri's ACL injury means he's out for the season but he's also paying for extremely poor Squad building as the lack of a backup defensive midfielder has been clear for Seasons the only options there are ilkai gundan who can do a job there but thrived in a double pivot earlier in his career and later in his career he's been moved further and further forward kovic is a deep Ling midfielder but again not one built to be a dedicated solo pivot and nunas
is much more a box tobox or even offensive midfielder the best midfielder in the world would always have been missed but it was made disastrous by Pep's second strength come weakness his tactical tinkering over the past couple of Seasons we have seen Guardiola try to come to terms with teams defending narrower and deeper and having their forwards on the city pivots so that the Midfield can cover the men in the half spaces and conquered the famous Midfield box this has been by playing with tradition fallbacks to let the Wingers inside to outnumber the opposition's Midfield
but this season he decided to roll back to the tactic that he used at the tail end of 2223 the Midfield Diamond it was a brilliant adaptation as now with Lewis High up they had that three versus two advantage in the creative Zone making it impossible for the opponent to decide when to press and when to sit it also meant that where before when pep had reverted to traditional fallbacks it was functional defenders in these vital creative zones now instead it was Elite 1 V one dribblers like dku and saino who could get past their
men and do damage at the same time the back three was spreading much wider to try and break apart these Uber narrow compact shapes but this Evolution has come with a crucial caveat because there's one position that went from being important to being the start and end of the team and the depth of the rodry injury has slowly become more and more apparent as the new system threatens to kill City season the system has only worked because rodri is for lack of a better word a freak he has the physicality and more importantly the positioning
to cover massive spaces defensively and in possession he was an even bigger Factor see kovich is an outstanding midfielder very technical and a good passer but the thing is rodri does things kovich cannot both of them are capable of being the metronomic short passer keeping things taking over but the game-changing difference is how they look to agress the ball kovic likes to hold on to the ball and take on his Midfield man with tight turns in high pressure situations a valuable skill but not the most important for two reasons dribbling is slower than passing and
with most teams looking to defend deep against City it just tends to give the opposition more time to get back in position secondly it means the most important unit of the side is moving around and changing the structure of the team pep himself said one of the key changes he made to turn rodri from being a good midfielder to a balandor winning one was getting him to understand the movement of a defensive midfielder should be minimal and here's the thing when kovachich stays in position it's still not the same because his passing range is limited
at least compared to rodri rodri has the ability to turn a recover possession into an attack quickly as he's able to play these longer passes that break the lines before the opponent can get into that hyper compact shape and looking at their Progressive passes and passes into the final third shows just how big that difference difference is but that's only the start because when opponents are trying to be too compact horizontally rodri has another weapon which is his ability to launch the switch one of the reasons the dribblers are so much more effective when rodri's
on the pitch is that they get the pass quicker and now they have more space to pick up speed before the opponent can close them down so now the dribbler has a running start at the fallback as well as a higher chance of a true One Versus One compare the same sequence when kovich is on the ball the ball will be worked across the Midfield firstly making it more OB obvious where it's going and letting the fullback get touch tight quicker and even giving the Winger a chance to drop deep and double up not good
but it goes deeper than that because a key relationship and a tactic city has always had just in case of emergency is Walker on the overlap whenever the Winger is being completely shut down out wide the citizens had the option of drawing in the fullback with their Winger and Walker using his Pace on the overlap The crucial ingredient Rod's chipped ball was like a heat seeking missile Landing straight on Walker's foot and allowing him to get the cross in but with kovic either the ball doesn't get released on time or it's more of a floating
pass that's not accurate enough another weapon gone from the city Arsenal so unable to change the tempo through the pivot City have attempted to Camp right in the opposition box so that eventually they can find that pass to unlock the defense and this has meant pushing the line higher and higher but we are just getting started because to understand the Fatal problem we need to think about Pep's career with every League he's managed in pep has learned something different something that each league specializes in in his home country the ideals of possession and technicality were
emphasized as his tiny team conquered the world in England it's been the importance of physicality as he built a team of giants who could still play but were big enough to take on their men but with his new system pep has forgotten the crucial lesson he learned in the Bundesliga and remembering this lesson may be the key in saving their season in Germany pep found a league where every single team was simply amazing at the Counterattack when he got there he tried a similar system to his Barcelona side a single pivot with overlapping fallbacks and
for a while every single team ran through his side sound familiar well pep learned a massive lesson you must must must deal with the Counterattack this philosophy has shaped his tactics for years at Bayern he inverted both of his fallbacks into a 23 formation and a city we've long seen a 3-2 shape with a fallback alongside the defensive midfielder but his latest even solution has changed this completely now that fullback pushes into an attacking Midfield line leaving a wide 3-1 shape with aggressive center-backs pushing up meaning the pivot is more and more isolated here's why
this matters even with rodri arguably the most complete midfielder in World football this setup was starting to show cracks last season his combination of physical presence and positional awareness meant that he could delay counters just long enough for City to recover sometimes because as the solo pivot even he was beginning beginning to struggle with the sheer amount of room he had to cover now with kovic in that role these cracks have become chasms when Rico Lewis plays at right back they're not just missing Rod's positioning they're also missing Walker's recovery Pace on the transition and
even if Lewis is the left back when Walker is fit the absence of a secondary pivot alongside kovich is glaring with all the midfielders pushed High the transition potential for opponents is enormous teams have figured out they don't need to try and play through City anymore they just need to stay compact wait for turnovers and then take a stroll through the city Midfield and now they'll be running straight at the backline and all it takes is one good pass and they're through on goal and we need to touch on The Wider regions very quickly because
that's another piece of the puzzle that's falling apart the purpose of bringing in svho was to have two genuine dribblers in the wide regions who could get past their men and get the B into Harland consistently well having explosive dribblers means having Risk Takers who might lose the ball and with city's new shape losing the ball often means directly conceding a chance this was unsustainable so as the games have rolled by we've seen less of the two dribblers playing together except when chasing the game before it would have been greish on the left manipulating the
opposition shape and using his gravity to draw several Defenders to him and open up space for midfielders or the chip ball into Harland but so far he's only played 35% % of the minutes available meaning Nunes a natural box-to-box midfielder is doing a job on the left and he is unable to get past his man consistently to get into chance creating regions all of this is bad enough but if we take a representative 11 from last season and look at the goals in the league alone their main goal threat Harland is still doing his part
but City have lost two of their top four goal scorers and foden is out of form and if we switch that stat to assists their main sister has mainly been injured well again they have lost two more from the top four sisters with Bernardo not being on form either so individual player performances are also a huge contributing factor with only Harland performing to last season's level perhaps most concerning is the intangible element that Relentless determination that characterized their treble winning season seems to have waned yet if anyone can solve these problems it's Guardiola this might
be his biggest challenge yet but it's not just about form or player availability it's about systemic weaknesses in a system of his own design the very tactical Evolution that brought him his best triumphs has become his biggest vulnerability now we'll wait to see if the master tactician can evolve once again great news I've just launched my newsletter the Tactical digest to give you an even deeper look into the Tactical side of the game and so much more it's completely free through my link down below so check it out
