Pep’s finest
feat? Making
City masters
of defence
James Gheerbrant
A
sk most people to name a
great defensive football
coach and they’ll probably
say Diego Simeone. And
looked at from a certain
angle, you could see Atletico Madrid’s
performance against Manchester City
in the Champions League on Tuesday
night as a near-masterpiece of
resistance. They were fierce,
combative and disciplined. They fell
back, at times, into two deep banks of
five, cutting off angles; snuffing out
space. For three quarters of the
match, they held one of the best
attacks in world football scoreless,
and they might just have got away
with it if it hadn’t been for that
nutmegging kid.
This is the defensive football that
you see in the guidebooks — the
visceral, obstructive, knife-between-
the-teeth stuff. But the real defensive
masterclass was on the other side.
City didn’t allow Atletico, who have
been averaging more than
10 shots a game in the
Champions League this
season, and than 12 in
La Liga, to register a
single effort on goal.
The occasion of the
pivotal Premier
League match between
Manchester City and
Liverpool is an
opportunity, quite rightly,
to talk some more about
some of the lavishly discussed
aspects of Pep-ball. These are two of
the best attacking teams that English
football has ever seen. Guardiola’s
City have turned those methodical,
beautifully orchestrated possession
sequences, often ending with a lethal
cut-back from the byline, into a
familiar art form. His capacity to
create playmakers out of defenders,
centre forwards out of midfielders,
chances out of losses of possession,
has elevated his team’s scoring
potential to a rare level.
When we talk about Guardiola, it is
therefore almost always in the
archetypal terms of the maker-genius
— architect, inventor, composer,
visionary. But there is also another
side which has, whisper it, been the
dominant influence on City’s past 18
months — a genius for negation.
Consider the ability of Manchester
City to make your best player
disappear. In the past 12 months they
have faced Europe’s holy trinity of
brilliant young strikers. Erling
Haaland, in last season’s Champions
League quarter-final, had two shots
across 180 minutes. Kylian Mbappé,
who at that point was on a run of
seven goals in five games, didn’t
manage a single shot in the semi-final
first leg. On Tuesday they
encountered João Félix, and the
wormhole swallowed him too. In 81
minutes, he touched the ball in the
box once.
The retooling of City’s defence,
after the 3-1 defeat by Lyons and the
5-2 loss to Leicester City in August
and September 2020, has been one of
the most impressive feats of
Guardiola’s career. City’s numbers
since then are remarkable. In the 87
matches in the Premier League and
Champions League since, they have
conceded 0.68 goals a game. They
are allowing, on average, about six
shots a match.
Dig into the numbers a little deeper
and it becomes clear that City are in a
class of their own. In the Champions
League, across this season and
last, City have conceded
chances worth 0.63
expected goals from 6.2
shots a game. No one
gets close — Chelsea,
Liverpool and Bayern
Munich have all
allowed around nine
shots, with Chelsea
conceding 0.75 xG, and
Liverpool and Bayern
around 1.1 (Atletico are also
on 1.1 xG against, from 11 shots
faced). City’s is the best defence in
the world.
The really remarkable thing about
their improvement is that they have
done it with the same high defensive
line that had begun to look a precipice
in those games against Lyons and
Leicester. Their average position, just
under 30 metres from their own goal,
is the highest in the Premier League
— a metre more advanced than
Liverpool. Yet while Liverpool have
allowed the second-most through-
balls in the league, behind Leeds
United, City have conceded the joint
fewest. How can a team play with
such a high line yet make the space
behind it so impenetrable? It is almost
a kind of football witchcraft.
City do it by keeping the distance
between their centre backs and
defensive midfielders close, and
squeezing the space in between the
lines from which an opposing
midfielder can slide a pass in behind.
The role of their interior full backs,
Kyle Walker and João Cancelo, hasGuardiola has impressively built Manchester City into a team in a rather
different image from his all-conquering Barcelona of 2008 to 2012been an important evolution — their
tendency to occupy the inside
channels further tightens the middle
of the pitch. Their initial counter-
press when City lose possession helps,
although given that Liverpool are so
susceptible to through-balls, it seems
unlikely to have a huge influence.
More important has been
perfecting that knife-edge art of
centre-back play — the delicate
semaphore of cues and triggers by
which defenders know, in that split-
second when the press is broken and
the ball is zipped into the middle
third, whether to step up or drop
back. “That’s what he always
hammered into us,” the former
Bayern Munich defender Jan
Kirchhoff told me in 2020.
“You can ‘defend forwards’ as long
as there is pressure on the ball, but
the moment there’s no pressure and
the opponent can play in behind, you
have to fall back and close that space.”
Guardiola has perhaps never had a
group of defenders who better
understand when to drop than
Rúben Dias, John Stones and
Aymeric Laporte.
If there is a team with the players to
unlock City’s defence, it may be
Liverpool. Sadio Mané has recently
been playing as a centre forward, and
his pace in behind might help to pin
back City’s centre backs, posing them
dilemmas and opening some of that
space between the lines. There is
probably no better passer in Europe
— no one more capable of finding the
chinks in City’s armour —than TrentAlexander-Arnold. Mohamed Salah,
as he showed in the reverse fixture,
has the sheer genius to create
something out of nothing. But their
task is perhaps the hardest in football
right now.
Guardiola’s teams have almost
always had great defensive records,
because they have always been the
most dominant teams in their league.
It has been his privilege to have
coached some of the best midfielders
and attackers of the modern era — to
have had players for whom taking
care of the ball is as fundamental as
breathing. Defending with the ball,
resting in possession — these are his
core tenets. “Without the ball we are
a disastrous team, a horrible team,” he
said of his treble-winning Barcelona,
and if there was a hint of
exaggeration there, that side could
afford to be.
What Guardiola has built over the
past 18 months is the opposite — a
genuinely brilliant off-the-ball team.
The beautiful attacking football, the
Cruyffian magic, the science of
manipulating space, was dripped into
his ear from boyhood. It runs through
his blood. Turning City into the
world’s hardest team to play through
has been something else —
something that didn’t come naturally
to Guardiola, something hard
thought, and hard won.
Whatever happens tomorrow, and
regardless of whether this season
ends with a Champions League
triumph or not, it is one of his finest
achievements.TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER BRADLEY ORMESHER8 1GS Saturday April 9 2022 | the times
Sport Football
It’s up for grabs now:
Past title-decidersNow and again matches late in a
Premier League campaign are
predicted to be season-defining —
but how often do these games
actually settle the title?
As the first chart shows, City and
Liverpool met in the home straight
of the 2013-14 season but the result,
a Liverpool win, did not turn out to
be decisive as City secured the title
anyway. In contrast, City’s victory
over Manchester United in the
closing weeks of 2011-12 did
ultimately make them champions.
However, as the second graphic
reveals, the cases of City in 2012 and
Chelsea in 2010 are among only five
since the Second World War where
the champions triumphed only
because of a victory over title rivals
within the final ten games.LATE-SEASON POTENTIAL
TITLE-DECIDERS SINCE 2010
Title rivals met within final ten
matches of season when within
three points of each other — or the
equivalent having played a different
number of gamesApr 13, 2014: Table before match
1 Liverpool P 33 Pts 74
2 Chelsea P 33 Pts 72
3 Man City P 31 Pts 70
Result Liverpool 3, Man City 2.
Final points totals Man City 86,
Liverpool 84, Chelsea 82Apr 30, 2012: Table before match:
1 Man United P 35 GD +54 Pts 83
2 Man City P 35 GD +60 Pts 80
Result Man City 1, Man Utd 0.
Final points totals
Man City 89 (GD +64), Man Utd 89
(GD +56)May 8, 2011: Table before match
1 Man United P 35 Pts 73
2 Chelsea P 35 Pts 70
Result Man Utd 2, Chelsea 1.
Final totals Man Utd 80, Chelsea 71Apr 3, 2010: Table before match
1 Man United P 32 Pts 72
2 Chelsea P 32 Pts 71
Result Man Utd 1, Chelsea 2.
Final points totals Chelsea 86, Man
Utd 85LATE-SEASON WIN OVER RIVALS
ULTIMATELY DECIDED TITLE
Team would not have won title
without beating rivals within last ten
games2011-12 Game 36: Man City 1, Man
Utd 0
Final table
1 Man City GD +64 Pts 89
2 Chelsea GD +56 Pts 892009-10 Game 33: Man Utd 1,
Chelsea 2
Final table
1 Chelsea Pts 86
2 Man United Pts 851988-89 Game 38: Liverpool 0,
Arsenal 2
Final table
1 Arsenal (73 goals scored) Pts 76
2 Liverpool (65) Pts 751976-77 (2pts for win) Game 34
(out of 42): Liverpool 2, Man City 1
Final table
1 Liverpool Pts 57
2 Man City Pts 561964-65 (2pts for win) Game 38
(out of 42): Leeds 0, Man Utd 1
Final table
1 Man United (2.28 Gx) Pts 65
2 Leeds United (1.6Gx) Pts 65Guardiola has
perhaps never
had a better
group of
defenders