There was something altogether more bleak about the latest in Manchester City’s flurry of recent defeats, and it was how inevitable so much of it felt from the start.
The result is one thing — Saturday’s 2-1 loss away to Aston Villa is the 11th time City have failed to win in 12 games across all competitions, and was the ninth time where they’ve been beaten in that run — but this was another hollow afternoon for Pep Guardiola’s weary squad that followed an all-too-familiar script.
It took less than a minute to see a defensive lapse from the side who only weeks ago were chasing their fifth straight Premier League title. Josko Gvardiol stumbling to send Jhon Duran through on goal was City’s 12th error leading to a shot in the top flight this season — more than in the entirety of the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons. Combined.
There was a killer pass in-behind the City’s high line for Villa’s opener, a powerful run through a struggling midfield for their second, and even another injury to a centre-back — John Stones, who had been rushed back into the starting XI too soon from his latest lay-off.
But in a match where City’s defensive issues were dreary and predictable, it was their lack of variety going forward that jarred the most.
Villa dropped deep and defended resolutely when they had to, but worrying patterns are starting to develop. Erling Haaland touched the ball once in the opposition penalty area (and even that came in the 89th minute), while Jack Grealish received 16 floated passes out to the left flank in the first half alone, a tell-tale sign City were struggling to play through Unai Emery’s defensive block.
The firepower in City’s squad can blow any team away, and can even paper over their defensive cracks. But when they hit a wall — as they did yesterday for the third game running — it only makes the issues easier to see.
One of the brilliant things about Guardiola’s near nine-year stint at City has been the array of attacking patterns they produce in the final third, but the current side are struggling to find flexibility in their traditional 3-2-5 build-up when teams deny them a route into the middle.
Against Villa on Saturday, Rico Lewis drifted inside from full-back when City had the ball, as always, while one of the deeper midfielders, Ilkay Gundogan, pushed on into the front line. Phil Foden was the other No 10, while Grealish and Bernardo Silva held the width.
Villa’s plan was to first block the passes from City’s back three into midfield. John McGinn was tasked with tucking inside from the right and stopping the route through to Mateo Kovacic, while it was Youri Tielemans’ job to do that when the champions built on the opposite side.
Further back, Amadou Onana and Boubacar Kamara were careful to pick up City’s two No 10s, as shown in the grab below.
City’s passing was not quick enough to find those players between the lines, and while Gundogan and Foden were happy to come short to get on the ball in deeper areas, they offered little in terms of runs in behind.
It meant the only option was to find Grealish — almost totally out of frame in the bottom left corner of the shot above — whose passes-received map from his return to boyhood club Villa illustrated just how often he was left as the free man out wide.
Grealish has been good when deployed more centrally in recent weeks, notably misplacing a single pass and adding more bulk to the midfield against Nottingham Forest at the start of this month, but he hasn’t scored a Premier League goal in 371 days. That he was City’s main hope for an attacking spark for much of the first half yesterday is not where a team of City’s attacking quality should be.
Now, Grealish did not have a particularly bad game. He brought down a raking pass from Stones after five minutes before cutting inside and firing wide, and did well to pick out a cross for Gvardiol just before half-time. But aside from a handful of moments where he looked to switch up the tempo, his receive-the-pass-then-cut-inside approach quickly became predictable — as it did on the other flank with Bernardo — in an attacking system that errs towards control over chaos in the final third.
The passing network below illustrates how Guardiola’s two wingers were isolated, missing overlapping runs from a full-back and with their No 10s getting man-marked out of the game.
This is where the frustration and irony come in.
Without the protective presence of long-term injury absentee Rodri, City are letting runners go, pressing poorly, and losing duel after duel in the midfield, but are still persisting with a dangerously high line to create the 3-2-5 structure they take up with the ball. And when the outcome is slow, ponderous and predictable, the risk to set up in that shape becomes even less worth taking.
City sorely lack a reliable, destructive attacking presence when playing this way — something only made clearer when the other team bulldoze through them with, as happened on Saturday, a former City player.
They could not handle Morgan Rogers, who was in the City academy but got sold to Middlesbrough of the Championship in summer 2023 for a reported fee of just over £1million at age 20 without a senior appearance and then joined Villa six months later in a £15m deal, throughout much of the second half. Though Rogers benefitted from more getting space on the counter-attack, he brought an explosiveness and forward drive to Villa that many of City’s forwards — Bernardo, Gundogan, Grealish — can’t consistently provide.
Foden’s late consolation goal, following a mazy run from substitute Savinho, was a glimpse of what might happen when City pick up the pace and allow their forward momentum to do the work. City never want a transitional game, but when mistakes are being made as often as they are, there are more instances when caution could be thrown to the wind.
Facing Everton — a team more than happy to bed in, and now armed with fresh intel from Villa Park on how to stop this City side — next time out at home on Boxing Day (Thursday), they cannot afford to be so passive in attack again.
(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
