Manchester City, what is going on? If you block out the noise, it’s pretty straightforward. They sold Rodri, and they didn’t sign any full-backs.
That’s not the consensus. Sloppy defensive mistakes have critics suggesting players are losing focus, while Enzo Maresca’s post-game comments after City’s third straight Premier League defeat did nothing to quieten the murmurs that the guilty verdict is beginning to gnaw away at his team.
“Today I think [the problem] has been general,” Maresca said. “You need desire and intensity to win second balls and duels; you require intensity, or you struggle - and we didn’t match their intensity.”
Why Enzo Maresca is wrong
But Maresca is wrong - and so are the pundits claiming psychology is the root of City’s drop-off.
Yes, it’s still all about Rodri. We might be tired of saying it but that doesn’t make it any less true.
During his seven years at the club, Manchester City’s win ratio was 71.5% with Rodri and 62.3% without, losing 12.1% of games he played and 26.2% of games he didn’t.
His absence remains keenly felt and never more obviously than on Saturday, because he would have prevented all three Nottingham Forest goals.
City lack control in possession and are therefore vulnerable to clumsily giving the ball away and conceding high-quality chances, because they don’t have Rodri’s immaculate positioning or smart press-releasing passing around the corner. The way Forest pressed high from the outset tells us Oliver Glasner was well aware of this flaw.
It led to Aston Villa’s opener in the 2-1 defeat, when the ball was spread out to Marc Guehi – who miscontrolled a tough ball – because there was no Rodri-pass in the middle; then it happened again for the opener on Saturday, this time far more egregiously as Elliot Anderson quite literally turned his back on the play.
Anderson was unavailable for the first pass, which would have drawn in the Forest players and opened up a pass out wide, and was unavailable for the second pass, when Josko Gvardiol needed help:
The second and third Forest goals both resulted from missed interceptions by Anderson, who misjudged the move and anticipated the counter too slowly. It is difficult to imagine Rodri making either mistake:
Maresca’s possession football would look more controlled if he had Rodri (or, as at Chelsea, Moises Caicedo) offering a metronomic presence on and off the ball, helping build slowly out from the back while screening against counter-attacks.
And Maresca would have more control with actual full-backs on the pitch. The Rodri Problem is well documented, but rarely have Manchester City been called out for bizarrely deprioritising full-backs, a position Maresca has developed more than any other Premier League manager in recent times.
The way he deployed Marc Cucurella, Reece James, and Malo Gusto – often in multiple positions at once, switching seamlessly depending on the phase of play – was truly innovative, yet he arrived at City without specialists at left-back or right-back.
Gvardiol’s mistake for Forest’s opener probably would not have been made by Cucurella, while Gusto or James would have connected where Matheus Nunes swiped at the air ahead of Brighton’s winner. Moreover, in Maresca’s system proper full-backs would drift neatly into central midfield, covering the very gaps Anderson failed to control on Saturday.
It’s worth noting that City haven’t won the title since Pep Guardiola stopped playing at least one traditional full-back; Kyle Walker or Joao Cancelo (or both) were prominent in each of City’s four in a row.
Losing Rodri and failing to replace him has undermined Maresca. Failing to sign any full-backs has made a difficult task almost impossible.
