The flaw
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The system wasn’t always productive for Manchester City. One wrong positional choice from the players was costing the shape and structure, allowing Stoke City to press aggressively for the ball.
Zabaleta, for one, tried to move higher up the pitch to draw Stoke’s defensive midfielders narrow and then open spaces for De Bruyne and Silva using lay-off back pass to Fernandinho. But it failed since he didn’t move high enough to receive such a pass in between Whelan and Allen.
Moreover, his positioning resulted in cover shadowing of De Bruyne and marking of Zabaleta easy and single job for the opponent.
Also, City had 6 players in two lines, which is not such a good positioning when positional play demands players at different depth and width to stagger the structure of a team in possession in order for better ball retention and penetration.
Navas, whose primary job was to stay wide and stretch the defense while the rest of the visiting team’s players were playing on the left side, was seen cutting in a few times. He eventually ended up being dispossessed and confused Zabaleta as well, who was mostly staying narrow.
City counter-pressing
Counter-pressing or the pressing done as soon as ball possession is lost in order to prevent the opponents from counter-attacking is one of the key elements of the Guardiola’s teams. At Barcelona and Bayern Munich, both the teams were tuned to press aggressively and effectively to win the ball back as quickly as possible.
Guardiola himself asserted his trust in counter-pressing during a recent interview: “I want the ball for 90 minutes. When I don't have the ball, I go high pressing because I want the ball.”
It is no doubt that his new team, Manchester City, is also starting to counter-press the opponents to great extents. While they have not been entirely perfect, in the sense players blocking the right passing lanes etc, but there were some good examples of City’s passing lane oriented counter-pressing.
In passing lane oriented pressing, the pressing team tries to block all the passing lanes of the ball carrier with the use of cover shadows. When Stoke City attempted to counter attack, City covered the ball carrying opponents from all possible angles to shut down his passing options – forcing the player to hold on to the ball or pass long.
As City’s attacks were getting thwarted in the high middle third, it was quite necessary for the visiting team to counter-press in order to deny the home team any chances of playing long and bypassing most of the City players in the process. The pressing, so as to win the ball back quickly, started from the very first line – led by Aguero and followed up by the players in the subsequent lines.
Manchester City defended with a 4-1-4-1 during Stoke’s possession phases. But to counter-press, City needed traps to lure the opposition players into. In order to create such favorable situations for counter-pressing, City players used layered structure.
This increased the triangles between players thus allowing them to close down on a particular ball carrying opponents present in between the City players. Also, such compact layered structure was driving Stoke’s players away towards the spaces where City was not compact but still had qualitatively superior players – like playing a long ball away from a compact space towards the forwards, which was getting intercepted by City’s defenders.
Winning the ball by counter-pressing was putting City in a commanding position. Since Stoke City was trying to make most of the possession by attacking quick, it was losing nearly four players when City players were winning the possession back in the middle third.
This was leaving the remaining players in situations where City had both numerical and qualitative superiority. Through these two, City was also gaining central access – thus the positional superiority as well. Such situations were leaving Stoke City vulnerable to quick passing and space opening leading to chance creations by the visiting team.
Stoke City’s response in second half
Stoke City was more aggressive and less passive than it was in the first 45 minutes of the game during the second half. With the intention of getting a goal back and then attacking for more, tried to make the most of its possession phase by targeting space through directness in attack.
In the build-up phase of Manchester City, Stoke was more involved as it attempted to deny safe passage for the visitors in their defensive third. The high-pressing was partly successful as Caballero was tested a few times. However, with space in the middle and free players like Silva were helping Fernandinho by forming a temporary or situational double pivot in order to bring the ball out with numerical superiority.
Lessons learned from the game
Manchester City is one step ahead of where it was last week. Better build-ups, positioning, flexibility in the attacks, pressing, compactness without the ball. However, a quick-footed and ball playing goalkeeper will surely help the team.
We saw today that Stoke’s direct play was landing the ball in front of City’s penalty box -where there were a few tense moments and luckily City didn’t concede in such scenarios. But these can be avoided by a sweeper keeper who is confident enough to anticipate passes and move out of the box to clear or collect and continue the play and help in attacking scenarios.
Although it was a huge win, there were a few on-field communication problems amongst the players – Sterling, however stellar his performances might have been, struggled to sense his next move and just looked around for Silva for a second or two (who actually was right behind him).
A clear understanding still needs to be developed amongst the players with respect to the system of play used and trained under Guardiola. With so many positional rotations and dynamic positioning players need to have a good level of verbal and non-verbal communications with each other.
All these can only develop with more training sessions and better involvement. That said, a win such as this boosts confidence which can only spur everyone involved at the club to learn and adapt quickly.
