Well, that didn’t take long. For a while either side of Christmas, the Premier League title race felt like an open-door kind of joint, with a revolving cast of regular faces taking a turn to rest an elbow on the bar. Across the opening 21 games of the season, seven different teams had a spell at the front of the queue. For all the strains of football in the time of plague, the Premier League’s upper reaches felt a dizzy, fun kind of place, more crowded speakeasy than exclusive club.
It has taken the recent blur of games to reassert the hierarchy. One thrilling surge of form later, Manchester City can go 10 points clear of Liverpool with victory at Anfield on Sunday afternoon, while maintaining their three-point lead over Manchester United with a game in hand.
For Liverpool in particular, there is suddenly a different kind of energy at the top: a creaking of the shuttered wooden doors, furtive looks around the spittoon, a gangling figure in a grey nylon leisure suit, white teeth flashing as he drains the dregs of his sports water. Welcome, Liverpool FC, to the last-chance saloon. And yes, it has come around quite quickly.
At times in the last few weeks, as these teams seemed to be refinding their drive, it had looked as though we might be heading for a familiar change of gear. The trip to Anfield will be City’s 22nd Premier League game. In both of the last two seasons, games 20-22 have been the point of ignition, with Liverpool and City occupying the top spots uninterrupted from that point.
Who knows, but for Liverpool’s lack of defensive cover, the season might have played out this way once again. In the event only City have been able to produce the familiar surge, and in a different way, too, with a run of victories based around a profound reconfiguring of Pep Guardiola’s team. And really it is City’s adaptations in defence, rather than Liverpool’s problems in the same area, that provide the real note of interest here.
Pep Guardiola has changed the rhythm and shape of his teams before. But this is essentially a defensive and positional change, a shift in the way his team go about stopping the opposition, from a coach renowned more for his obsession with midfielders and angles of attack. It is an impressive note of variation at a time in Guardiola’s life when even the best, or indeed Most Special, can become stuck in their methods.
The comparison with Klopp’s current defensive struggles deserves some context. Liverpool have lost their two best centre-halves. Guardiola’s excellent feat of coaching has coincided with spending £170m on new defenders, which, you know, kind of helps.
This is always the Pep paradox, and a familiar point of objection for the remarkably persistent bald-fraud brigade. Guardiola does get the players. But what he has done with them is fascinating, a rejig of systems and personnel that will meet its greatest test to date on Sunday.
That defensive record is well-rehearsed. Take away Chelsea’s 90th-minute consolation goal at Stamford Bridge in January and City would be going for a 10th straight Premier League clean sheet when they walk out at Anfield.
That goal is still the only one City have conceded in the 13 games Rúben Dias and John Stones have started together. This isn’t a matter of blocks and saves either. This is systemic, deeply stitched defence, with an ever-declining Xg-against score across that run.
The key players in this are obvious enough. The armature of this City team is built around Guardiola’s work with Stones, Dias and João Cancelo, with Aymeric Laporte also re-entering the equation in time to face an ominous test on that left flank against the combined attacking riches of Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold.
Cancelo has been the key man. In fact, this entire City defensive rejig could be seen as a journey from Kyle Walker steaming back at incredible speed to execute a last-ditch defensive barge – Walker is a brilliant recovering defender – to Cancelo’s steadier rhythms, a player happy to step inside and nervelessly retain possession, relying on the partnership inside him to cover those spaces.
With the central defence so settled, Cancelo has been able to provide not just an overload in midfield, but a dominant presence, a playmaker. His numbers for shots and passes from full-back are predictably good. It is his total confidence on the ball that has made the real difference. Positional shifts, innovative new roles: it helps when you have a brilliant individual putting them into practice.
The trip to Anfield only emphasises how much has changed since the last time these two teams met, in November at the Etihad. That day City were 10th, Liverpool third. Guardiola was still a few weeks way from settling on Stones and Dias as his unarguable No 1 pair, and still starting with a 4-2-3-1 formation.
The Chelsea game just after Christmas was the watershed moment. Deprived of any regular strikers, Guardiola went with a bold, initially startling 4-3-3, with Kevin De Bruyne as a false 9, and Stones-Dias flanked by the “progressive” full-backs Cancelo and Oleksandr Zinchenko.
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Everything clicked. After a nervy start City had a 20-minute spell in the first half where they dominated the ball and had 10 shots at goal. Lampard-era Chelsea looked utterly baffled. Zinchenko has kept his place through most of the winning run, another confident ball-playing presence, and a full-back who comes inside rather than skating precariously up and down the flank. City have been taking five, six, seven shots per game, and winning at a canter.
Anfield is something else, though, the start of a run of tougher games that will really test this system. City have all their best centre-backs fit now, with Laporte tucking in against Burnley this week to provide a powerful quasi-back three. But Liverpool will surely press wide down their right to test that join.
Guardiola has never won a game at Anfield. If his team can dish up another of those suffocating defensive performances that record, and indeed Liverpool’s title defence, could have a new look by Sunday night.
from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3cP0K8e
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