Slice it anyway you like, but things aren't looking too good for Manchester City. In the knee-jerk reaction, they've just been beaten at home, to nil, by Alan Pardew's confusing mess of a Newcastle team, the defence of their League Cup over before the quarter-finals. In the short term: since trotting back onto the pitch for the second half against CSKA Moscow last Tuesday, they've conceded six goals and scored just one. In the slightly-longer-but-still-quite-short term: of the 14 competitive games City have played this season, they've won just six and lost four.
Manchester City look awful and it might get worse
Dumped out of the League Cup by Newcastle, Manchester City have made a terrible start to the season, and if they’re not careful their campaign could be over before it’s really begun.
Richard Heathcote
This is not a crisis. Not yet. But it might well be the groundwork for something crisis-shaped in the near future, particularly if one or both of their next two games, Manchester United and CSKA Moscow, both at home, goes badly. Anything but a win in the latter and City's ongoing bid to do something — anything — in Europe will be mortally wounded; anything but a win in the former, and it won't just be the peculiar concept of inter-city bragging rights that takes a hit, it'll be the more tangible business of the title defence. Undefeated front-runners Chelsea, since you ask, are at home to 19th-placed QPR.
The obvious culprit is the defence. City have played fourteen games this season and have kept just three clean sheets: against Newcastle United on the opening day of the season, against Aston Villa in the League, and against Championship Sheffield Wednesday in the League Cup. That's only one more than weekend opponents United, who have played five games fewer, who have had a defensive injury crisis bordering on the epidemic, and whose work at the back has generally been regarded as something both tragic and comic.
Fingers are being pointed in the direction of Eliaquim Mangala, and eyebrows are being raised in the direction of his price tag. The Frenchman was every inch a £30m-plus defender in his debut against Chelsea; he's been a raw 23-year-old ever since, and last night was made to look irrelevant for Newcastle's first goal, then vaguely silly for their second. And though most his errors haven't generally been of the comical variety — wonderful own goal against Hull City aside — he perpetually looks one beat off his proper position, here too tight, there too deep, always open to exposure by the right run or the right pass.
That, presumably, will improve with time, as he adjusts to English football and to the demands of his new coach and the styles of his new colleagues. More concerning, perhaps, are the dips in form of those ahead of him. Defending isn’t just a job for defenders, and City’s midfield has looked uncharacteristically vulnerable. While Yaya Toure’s collapse in form has been the most noticeable — he is, oddly, playing like a man who has eaten far too much cake — his partner Fernandinho has been suffering from sophomoric shakiness, and Fernando has yet to settle. Up front, Sergio Aguero’s terrifying accuracy has been compensating for Edin Dzeko’s impotency, but the state of Aguero and Stevan Jovetic’s fitness means that the Bosnian could at any moment find himself the leading man.
There are, of course, individual explanations for each of City's poor results, with the possible exception of the CSKA collapse. The effervescent David Silva limped off early against Newcastle; Sergio Aguero missed a couple of sitters against West Ham; Roma and Bayern Munich are, respectively, pretty good and very good teams; Stoke ... er, well, Mame Biram Diouf did score the only goal of the game by running the entire length of the pitch before nutmegging Joe Hart, and certainly the first part of that is quite rare. And it is early, early days; last season, City lost four of their first eleven games. Then they won eleven of the next twelve, scoring 40 goals in the process.
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Pellegrini, speaking after last night’s game, pointed to a wider psychological malaise. “We are not playing well. We are in a difficult moment with a lack of trust. We are conceding easy goals and we are not scoring the chances we had to score. There’s a lack of confidence that we must arrange as soon as possible.”
In a funny sort of way, opposing teams can smell such a lack of confidence, and it’s hard not to feel that opposing teams don’t seem to treat Manchester City with the respect commanded by previous champions. Teams arrive at Jose Mourinho’s Stamford Bridge they way they used to arrive at Alex Ferguson’s Old Trafford: shoulders hunched, eyes hunted, already one goal down in their heads and their hearts. This season, they’ve been turning up to the Etihad with a skip in their step, knowing that organisation plus one good, quick break will do the job. City dropped five points at home the entire of last season; this time around, they’ve dropped that many before November.
The temptation, this being City, is to assume that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the entire club, in a vaguely mystical way. That “typical City” are in some way fundamentally incapable of stitching success to success the way great teams do. This season already looks a bit like their last title defence, over before it really started. Perhaps pale blue is not a colour that can ever be compatible with a truly terrifying football team; perhaps the club needs to Don Revie itself over to something more impressive. Perhaps Pellegrini simply isn’t cut out to be the paradigm-shattering nails-hard dynasty-shaping bastard that the situation would seem to demand.
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Still, it's too early to be sure. Once the derby's out of the way, the league offers up a relatively friendly run of fixtures until the New Year, with only the trip to Southampton and a visit from Everton standing out as obvious potential banana skins. (Other banana skins may be lurking, perhaps disguised as apple cores or satsuma peel. This is the Premier League, guaranteed 75% potential banana skin or your money back!) As for Europe, Roma's pasting at the hands of Bayern Munich means that hope is not yet lost; only two points behind the Italians, this time next week City could well be sitting second in the group.
More immediately, the weekend provides a perfect opportunity for City to pick up a statement win. United have been improving, will arrive heartened by the last-minute draw against Chelsea, and will certainly fancy the thought of Angel di Maria running at Mangala, are still a vulnerable work in progress. But nevertheless, City will be favourites, and rightly so. Two good wins, and the trust and confidence could come flowing back. This isn’t a crisis. Yet. Check back in a week.
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