ETIHAD STADIUM — In his own half, Ander Herrera has a fight on his hands. One Manchester City player is applying pressure while two others, the henchmen of the main protagonist, are blocking off passing lanes. Herrera has no easy option and resorts to a ball clipped forward that bounces into space. It is hoovered up hungrily by a light blue shirt and everything resets again.
But that is not where the instructive action is happening. Forty yards away from Herrera, vaguely thrusting a communal glance in his direction as someone might watch a workman hard at graft from a nearby bench, are Paris Saint-Germain’s three forwards. Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and Lionel Messi are not trying to give Herrera an out-ball. They are walking back to halfway, all within 10 yards of each other.
And that is why it cannot be easy managing PSG. You feel like less of a football manager and more of an emotionally invested observer, watching on and hoping the superstar players you have to pick when fit click and the worker bees around them can manage on their own. That has been the accusation under Mauricio Pochettino: results (most of them wins) seem to happen to PSG because of their sheer weight of talent rather than being concocted through tactical brainwave or inspirational call-to-arms. But then he isn’t the powerbroker; the talent is. The talent will often be enough. Eventually in this competition, it won’t be.
This is the type of fixture that the Champions League group stage has unhelpfully come to specialise in, two European super-heavyweights in a glamour encounter that jumps out in the August draw but doesn’t actually mean a great deal by late November. RB Leipzig’s early comfortable lead in Bruges removed all jeopardy. It gave the encounter the feel of gold-plated all-star games, both managers able to spend the build-up perfecting their #respect for each other and then releasing their superstar players out of a tunnel to entertain us.
Noel Gallagher as a pitchside pundit? Yes. DJ and production duo CamelPhat playing a live set in the stadium before kick-off? Yes, that too. Light show, pitchside mega-sparklers? Yes to both. After ten minutes of being punched in the face via several senses, a football match was allowed to break out. At least the music died down to allow City supporters to boo the Uefa anthem. Some traditions can never die.
But here’s the thing: people quite like the all-star game. As long as it’s not every week, there’s something alluring about watching two teams try to win when they are not haunted by the prospect of losing. And when two diametrically opposing systems collide, it creates a spectacle by itself. Jeopardy is usually required; sometimes fantasy is enough.
The game effectively came into life in the moments after each time PSG won back possession. That created a window in which those in lighter blue tried to swarm over their opponents. PSG, for their part, attempted a series of exacting passes to link play and launch a counter-attack. This was industry vs luxury, high press vs “press here for champagne”.
In possession, Riyad Mahrez was the match’s bellwether. City repeated the same trick, quick passing triangles in the centre or left of the pitch that pulled across PSG’s defenders as if playing on a tilted pitch. Then came the switch, ending in Mahrez controlling the ball impeccably and either crossing, shooting or taking on his man.
But for all Mahrez’s space and time spent on the ball, he neither scored a goal nor created one. PSG were indeed able to repel City’s repeated attacks, owing as much to good fortune as good practice. And then, on one of those rare occasions when the first four elements of PSG’s meticulous passing sequences actually got the ball to the feet of Messi, he rushed forward, crossed for Mbappe and you realised why this rampant individualism, this anti-system system, might actually work.
But individuals can never beat a system, not when the system contains players with the feather-light touch of Bernardo Silva, the spatial awareness of Raheem Sterling and the overlapping pace of Kyle Walker. Guardiola’s team tests you too much, interchanges position too often, attacks you from too many different angles for a team to defend with seven outfield players.
“When PSG come looking for you, it is so that you adapt to an existing structure, to the players recruited, to get what the club wants,” Pochettino said last week. That can be interpreted as a compliment, insult or statement of fact, depending on how you squint.
Amid current circumstances, with Manchester United potentially offering an escape route, it translates as a solemn reflection on a job where power and powerlessness meet. There is a reason why managers win European trophies after they leave Paris. It’s time City’s system won their first.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3oX4Q2C
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