I agree but I also keep in mind how early in the season we are - no one should have expected the spectacle most of us were hoping/expecting this soon in the season. Between Pep being new and Barcelona still dealing with new player integration and injuries, no one is in spring form yet
Champions League gameweek 3
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I agree but I also keep in mind how early in the season we are - no one should have expected the spectacle most of us were hoping/expecting this soon in the season. Between Pep being new and Barcelona still dealing with new player integration and injuries, no one is in spring form yet
Even considering the play of Leo, Umtiti was MOTM for me - he's been a fantastic addition to the club and since preseason I was convinced he would be a mainstay in defense for years to come. Remarkable how quickly he has fit into this team and even how his injury early in the season already left the club hurting
Don't agree here, he can't be responsible for players failing to deliver let alone make errors - as good as the squad is for City, they are not accustomed to delivering at an elite level week in & week out. They have an elite coach, now they need an elite squad
RE: Hummels, Loved this
I think they changed it because of that picture right before the match. Brilliant move by their twitter team.
Seems a lot of people need to take step back to look at the Barca-City game properly. City more than held it own against Barca, at Camp Nou, and saw victory fall out of reach only due to individual mistakes. There hadn't been a Catalan class of mastery or anything of the like and things could just as well have gone the other way. And this is a team that had been considered underdogs against a lesser team such as PSG only half a year ago.
The progress City has made is nothing to be sniffed at.
The progress City has made is nothing to be sniffed at.
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Not starting Aguero cannot be explained other than it being a stupid decision. No logic behind it. Playing it out the back with the poorly technical players he has against a team that presses a lot was suicidal, I honestly predicted that City were going to struggle big time with that if they didn't try to change it a little.
Guardiola, by sticking to his principles, showed his limitations in that match.
I think its bizarre to mention that Barca team in this conversation, that team dominated games and most teams struggled to get a sniff against them. I actually think that City played pretty well till the sending off but it also has a lot to do with the fact that in terms of overall style and dominance this Barca team is completely different to Pep's Barca. These days even against smaller teams in La liga Barca tend to give away a lot of chances and rely heavily on the MSN magic rather than their overall style of play.
Going against Barcelona with 5 more or less offensive players would be suicide. Pep has pinned the system on inverse fullbacks - that means that he has to have wingers that keep the width - and usually needs them to be able to do 1vs1s. Silva and KDB are offensive midfielders that you might use as 8s but actually both usually think offensive and not defensive.
Now - I understand that he does not want to play 2 10s, 2 offensive wingers and a striker against Barcelona...
So the question actually was who of Agüero or KdB (or Silva) will be benched.
I am pretty sure the thread would be named Wayne deBruyne when it would have been de Bruyne and not Agüero... The difference with both is their workrate...
Then it's easy, you bench one of them. City had a decent first half with good openings, Aguero would have given them a better chance at scoring a goal at least.
Guardiola just tried to be too cute for his own sake there IMHO. Sometimes you do not need to complicate football.
Have to agree. Having a natural born goalscorer who, has actually scored vs this Barcelona team, surely would help. Aguero movement, power, skill and finishing is different level to the alternatives. P.S. if Barcelona were missing defenders, wouldn't it be good to expose that to Kun?
Never mind not starting him but what about playing him at the start of the second half with Piqué and Alba off and them trailing by a goal. How do you justify not playing your best player ?
But you have consider that everything you add on one end has to be subtracted on the other end.
Agüero instead of De Bruyne/Silva would have meant better offensive movement & shot conversion, but at the same time less compactness, ball control & less efficient pressing on Barca's build up play. Balance is a fragile thing, and the balance was just about right that day. Barca was already dangerous on breakthroughs as it was, so diminishing the defensive structure further could have been the tipping point for a hammering (when still 11 v 11). And worse pressing & less control could have meant that City can't get the ball into the final third as much as they did, so Aguero could very well have been starved of the ball by Barca's undisrupted possession play.
People tend to look only on the positives when it comes to hypothetical changes and ignore the downsides. Looking at only one isolated consequence of an important change like that instead of the effect on the overall composition of the team. I think your post has that tendency too.
Pep is always extremely cautious in away matches in the CL and it rarely paid off. It is one of the few mistakes that he repeats over and over again.
I agree when it comes to Barca & Bayern (at least in general), because of their huge quality in all departments. But City was the clearly inferior side this time. Do you think a more open match would have helped them?
No, but I don’t think that the match would be automatically more open by starting with Aguero. I don’t think that it was a crucial mistake in this case; maybe a minor one. Pep seems to try to put special emphasis on control in these matches. That sounds good on paper, but in reality his teams get more vulnerable in the back because of it, while also giving up much of their offensive firepower.
I don’t think that wrong tactics were the deciding factor in this match, but using Aguero would have still been a good idea.
I have read somewhere that Guardiola was dissatisfied with Aguero's workrate off the ball. Don't know how credible it is, but it's the only good explanation for his exclusion in this particular match I have come across.
I agree in general again, and Guardiola's away record kind of confirms this. But on Wednesday I haven't seen a lack of firepower on City's behalf, they could have scored one or two. The difficult balance between threatening Barca's goal and surviving defensively was good until the send-off, imo.
Let us say for the sake of argument you are right even if I mostly disagree with you, what about at the start of the 2nd half ? Why no Aguero then ? Specially considering the injuries and the scoreline. Guardiola was rightly criticized on BeInSports France.
Seldom if ever does a manager change the team at half time when he feels the tactical formula has worked in the first half. Guardiola is generally not shy of making early in-game adjustments, so I guess things were going according to plan (regarding the on-field balance, not the scoreline). I suppose he only would have opened up the game more between the 75th and 80th minute, if City were still down by then. The developments of the second half have made that game plan irrelevant, of course.
I don't want to deny that it could have been beneficial to play Aguero - maybe that would have been the key, who knows? I merely think the minutes 1-56 have proven Guardiola right with this unusual line up, for the most part, and I think I can see the reasoning behind it.
But hey, several posters have discussed this game back and forth in this thread, and I appreciate that discussion. Was fun for me (except one altercation), but it doesn't seem that there's that much more to say by now, so we probably better move on.
Cheers!
You are explaining things from his perspective rather well but it doesn't his tactical choices any weird. He had an opportunity to try something a little bolder and he shied away, Bravo took care of the rest.
As you said, trying to be "too cute"