Enzo Fernandez sauntered off the pitch with a wry smile, blood trickling from his nose, a job well done. He was, of course, the villain, the catalyst, encapsulating the grit and steel behind Manchester City’s battling victory at Old Trafford.
But that telling of Sunday’s game is flawed, the smirk largely unearned.
In order to beat Manchester United, Enzo Maresca had to plan around Fernandez, not with him. The adaptation to Phil Foden’s red card – flipping the tactical pattern of the match – benefitted Manchester City only because it tamed Fernandez, whose presence was proving more disruptive to City than Foden’s absence.
Release the hound
To play Fernandez is to release the dogs of war. He pulls at the chain until it snaps, which can be extremely useful in a Manchester derby but also, to be frank, a liability. The tactical story of City’s win is one of how Maresca reined him in.
In the first half, before Foden’s red card and after it, Manchester City’s new midfield was a mess. Elliot Anderson (magnificent throughout, but overworked) was stationed alone at the base with Rayan Cherki and Fernandez nominally deployed as eights in front of him, a bold attacking move from Maresca that backfired when Fernandez moved wildly out to the left flank or into the forward line, leaving Anderson isolated.
Fernandez’s strange positioning emptied the middle for City, limited their passing options and, in turn, forcing slow and hesitant sideways possession. Below, he is too far wide (image 1) or too high (image 2), allowing Manchester United to surround Anderson and/or dominate empty space:
Maresca told Sky Sports after the game that his initial plan with Cherki and Fernandez as eights had been to “attack a little bit [more] to create an overload in the middle against the extra midfielder”, ruling out the possibility Fernandez’s positioning – so wide, so high, so weird – was a tactical instruction from the dugout.
It allowed Manchester United to grow into the contest, pinch possession in that vacated middle, and transition quickly, just as Michael Carrick would have hoped. It was the exact tactical battle everyone had predicted (City possession, United counters) and clearly United were on top, harassing and frustrating the visitors until Foden snapped, and the tactics were reversed.
Well, eventually. At first, Fernandez kept making the same bizarre decisions despite being part of a two-man midfield. City remained all at sea:
Here is a typical example of how Fernandez’s positioning left City overly stretched and, therefore, vulnerable to being caught in transition when the ball was lost:
It wasn’t until half-time that Maresca found a way to pull on the leash. He brought on Illiman Ndiaye for Cherki and instructed his players to sit back, therefore compressing space between the lines with a simplified defensive structure in a 4-4-1 formation, conceding the ball to United but, counter-intuitively, regaining the initiative.
Gianluigi Donnarumma started playing long balls up the pitch, punting it into the United half to prevent Manchester City from even attempting to build out from the back. The idea was to cut out midfield, win the second balls that fell around Erling Haaland, and get Ndiaye weaving through the lines.
The passing football – which had lured Fernandez into his ultra-expansive mindset – disappeared, and as a consequence the spaces shrank. City were now compact off the ball (falling back instead of pressing) and on it (pushing up to receive long balls, rather than spreading out in their own half to play through United).
The long balls up for Haaland were played again and again until one of them – Haaland challenging, Ndiaye picking up the pieces – led directly to the controversial winner:
Before kick-off, Maresca said his team needed to “embrace the noise, embrace the chaos,” a call to lean into the atmosphere and ride out the madness of derby day. Nobody embodied that mentality better than Fernandez and, in that respect, his role was important.
But ultimately, what defined this match was a tactical rewrite enforced by Foden’s red card yet designed to tame Fernandez’s excesses.
Fernandez embraced the chaos. Maresca contained it.
