Why Man City Dominated Real Madrid, But Couldn't Win

All right so this was Manchester City and I think with the exception of the missing Johnstone’s, this isn’t just their strongest 11 but it is beat for beat the treble winning team. Now the plan is you are no doubt familiar with by this point when Man City said it this way, is to bring one of the defenders forward from the back line into the midfield to give us the three box 3. They do this because so many teams invariably set up in either A433 or A4231. So theoretically that gives them four players in an area where most teams only have three. So this shape combined with the fact that Edison can just play as a regular centre back if you want to meeting the outnumber you absolutely everywhere when they’re building up, means you have to come to play Man City with some kind of plan. And Real Madrid’s plan was this. Basically a four to four with all their attackers in a flush line sitting between the defence and the first line of cities midfield with a plan to force them wide this loads before Madrid got that goal. Like the defenders, the goalkeeper, they were allowed to have the ball in this area and just sort of circulate it around and Madrid players would sort of trot out to them to close them down. But crucially, these central 2 here would only do so if they could leave their man in their what’s known as. I think I was called it Shadow cover, but someone in the last video told me it’s cover Shadow. Like you get the idea they blocked the pass even though they’re not marking the man. They were basically trying to get City to go wider and then they jump far more aggressively and try and cut off all the passing options back in field at the same time to try and win it back. But The thing is, you’re never going to keep City in this part of the pitch for too long, so their main part of the plan was more centrally and more cleverer SO2 little facts for you here, friends. Fact number one, you can’t really have serious aspirations of winning a game of football if your centre forwards primary job is just to be meet in the middle of the pitch. But also fact #2. You’re only ever really outnumbered if you want to be Madrid’s main plan for dealing with City’s box midfield, which suggests forget about Akanji. Like in a scenario with Rodri De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva, he’s definitely the least dangerous on the ball. He’s probably the one you can most allow to have that space, so they were quite happy to let him sort of roam free. And if we show you his heat map from the game, you can see that as a result of that, he kept finding himself as the spare man in the final third of the pitch. So he was receiving the ball there absolutely loads. Now this is obviously an enormous gamble because if he plays a blinder then you’re going to get absolutely hammered, like relaxing the marking and relaxing the pressure around a particular player so you can focus it elsewhere is a very Ancelotti, no tactics, just vibes idea. But if we show you his past map at the same time, yeah, he gets it a lot. He’s receiving it pretty much all the way across that frontline. But how many of these passes are ending up in the box? How many of them are incisive? How many of them actually create chances? Well, virtually none is the answer to that. But City’s best chance in that half did come about as a a result of this Akanji situation, but also B the main thing they were trying to do in the final third. Like the three Box 3 system is designed to do 2 things primarily like first of all it gives you numbers in the build up phase you can play through a lot easier. But also it’s supposed to give you space and numbers again in the final third cities wide players. And this is sometimes by the way, while we talk about whether or not this is a great fit for Phil Foden because when you’re stuck out there in this system you are really stuck out there. Their job is to hold as much of the width as possible to try and like lure the defenders toward them. Now given that Warner sometimes both of the center back will be concerned with Holland. If you can drag a fullback out of position, if you can bait them towards the touchline, that in theory leaves you loads of room in both channels for your 3 eights as we call him to get on the ball or possibly even running behind. And in that first half City actually got in once or twice by doing this exact thing. Like Kevin De Bruyne was being man marked by Tony Cruz, but all he had to do was slip his marker Vader’s attention for a couple of seconds and when Mehndi was getting drawn out of Foden that space was there. Now this is the build up to that chance, right? Foden has received the ball really wide. He’s drawn Mendi towards him and that is not one of the center backs, that is Tony Cruz. So the actual distance between Madrid’s back four here is enormous. And of course Please note who is the unmarked player in this scenario, Manuel Akanji. So Foden rolls the ball into him and obviously that means Real Madrid now have to become alive to the danger Akanji presents. And the only player in attendance is Tony Cruz, so he takes his attention off De Bruyne for a split second. De Bruyne can now exploit that space between Mendy and the defence Akanji plays him in really well and they should, with a slightly better delivery, get a goal from this. So I know that did happen forward the Real Madrid goal, but just an example of how City did seem to have a really good handle on this and despite Madrid’s good set up stopping them doing exactly what they wanted to do, they were still dominating and making chances. But anyway none of that matters does it? Because then Real Madrid managed to score a goal and I have seen Kyle Walker getting pelters for this, for playing the loud on side. But can we just back that up for a couple of seconds? Is actually really good play by Madrid exploiting Man City’s press? Yes it is now. The danger that Tony Cruz presents on the ball means that Kevin De Bruyne couldn’t really jump off him to press the centre backs because if he found some space and he got on it then that’s probably Madrid’s most dangerous player in this area on the ball completely free. So he was tasked with this. You don’t really want to jump Bernardo Silva either for similar reasons. So the job of joining in with the Press of the defence and specifically center backs fell to Jack Greelish. Now that’s actually quite a good thing from Man City perspective because Danny Carver was playing very aggressively, was pushing really far up. So by having Greelish press this area, it means if they did win the ball back straight away, Greelish will be in loads of space. So it kind of two good reasons to do that. But what it does force them to do is have Guardiol push all the way up this side to then make sure the carvahal can’t get on the ball. Just yes, I know what you’re thinking. That is a centre back playing as a fullback being asked to press another fullback in his own half. That’s just Guardiola, that’s what he does. And would you believe it, this shape here with Man City’s back for doing this presents a problem if you can get the ball into that area, which they did. It’s played out to Carvajal exactly the way Guardiola will have predicted. He’s not really got anything on. You can put the pressure on him, hey, maybe you can turn the ball over, but no, he just humps it long into the centre of the pitch and Jude Bellingham manages to take a touch. So good. I have legitimately been for pregnancy test this morning. It’s a ball now, obviously, because Vardiol has pushed up that much on the left hand side, Diaz has covered across and Rodri has sat in a little bit. So City are actually pretty good here. They’ve got an improvised back four, so the space isn’t too much of an issue. That’s the problem with improvising anything, my friends can go slightly wrong. Diaz’s natural instincts. When Bellingham receives the ball in the center of the pitch, given that’s probably his man ought to go back into that area, especially when he jinx around Rhodri. So now Man City have found themselves in the position where this is their sort of improvised backfall. Not good, and this is their actual backfall. Either way, that now gives Valverde all this space to get into. And Bellingham, Julie obliges in with the pass. Now Okay. Yes, Carl Walker, you are an experienced England international. You one of Man City’s most important players. You are looking along this line. If you just stop, if you just hold your position, this move is finished and Real Madrid never score from it. But the reality is, and This is why I’m going to let Kyle Walker off with this, he is in this side to stop any of madrids, attackers, whoever is over on the left from breaking into the space behind. His job is to cover those runs. So in his head he is constantly trying to give himself an extra yard or two and it’s that extra yard or two plays him on side. What I don’t think you can let him off for is his decision making here because he’s got everything under control. He’s blocking off the past. They can’t make a run. All he’s got to do is just have a quick look over his shoulder to see where his player is. Instead he gets drawn towards the near post to stop a near post run. That is never happening. There’s nobody there, Nobody’s going to do that. And as a result he can’t cut that pass out and the score. Now this presented a pretty major problem to Man City because they were playing really well, exploiting the areas of space that Real Madrid leaving. But now Real Madrid had a goal to protect and started leaving a lot less of that space. Madrid just then went about as deep as a Jeff Buckley song and as compact as corn beef, more or less defended man for man, and stopped City really having too much of the ball in the areas where they could hurt them. And just to show you how much Man City struggled to get the ball in the areas they wanted to have it right. On average in the Premier League this season, Man City have attempted about 16 or 17 crosses last night and oh boy, they attempted 46 crosses from Open Plain. Madrid routinely forced them around the sides, denied them any sort of penetration in the middle and City tried everything to play through the middle of Madrid. Like I’ll just show you the average positions right? Because this is quite funny. Bernardo Silva, Kevin Debruyne and Phil Foden are an amorphous BLOB in this right hand channel because they kept interchanging positions so much from the 2 eighths and the wide right to just try and find a bit of space to evade a market to make. Something happened but quite correctly Pep Guardiola realised that the incision was not going to come from these three players in this space. It was from the one man who was holding his position. Jack Grealish. Or rather Jack Grealish is area of the pitch behind Danny Carver. Because when everything is so tight and everybody is defending so manfully, the thing that will open this up better than any clever piece of play or interchange or positional yadda yadda yadda, is just take a man on and beat him. And you know what? As far as quite telling graphical representations go, this one is definitely 1:00. Every single take on basically running at another player with the ball, trying to get around them through dribbling that Manchester City attempted in that match. And the concentration of them, I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite heavily weighted into Danny Carverhall’s area of the pitch. Now, Jack Grealish, I thought, had a pretty good game. He was stretching Madrid really well. His work on the ball was good, his work off the ball was good, but it was when they subbed him, when they bend him. For Jeremy Doku, literally a specialist in this sort of nonsense, that’s when City looked their most dangerous. And a case in point, this is that graph, but just Jeremy Doku’s contribution to it. Now, I know there’s a lot of Reds in this, but you’ve got to think like even if you’re not getting past the play with the ball, you’re still forcing them back when you’re doing that. So the amount is almost as important here as the success. And that is exactly how Man City got their equalizing goal, because running players, taking players on creates moments of chaos and uncertainty, and they profited through one Doku receives the ball out wide, and at this point he’s not even up against Kamervinga. They’ve dropped Valverde all the way back because of how worried they are about what he can do, but regardless, he runs into the box and this creates that moment of uncertainty. You can see Bellingham and Kamervinga both pointing at De Bruyne, expecting the other person to pick him up, but in the few seconds that transpire after that, he finds the space required to be on the receiving end of the save and he tucks it away. Now if like me, you’re watching this game, you probably thought, well, that is it. Now City, you’ve got all the momentum, they’ve got the goal of finding a route through. This should surely let them get the winner, and everything I have talked to you about so far in this video should have combined perfectly for them to get a second goal. It is the 80th minute and you have seen every element of what is about to happen already in this video. Doku is why that has drawn out the full back and created this enormous gap between him and the defender. But not only that, the unmarked player in this scenario, the one Madrid are choosing not to worry too much about, is Manuela Kanji. And because he is deemed to not be the big priority, he’s the one who can exploit this gap between the fullback and the center back. And Doku finds him with it. He gets to the byline, he cuts it back and lo and behold, which Manchester City attacker has been able to slip off the back of his market to find a little bit of room. Kevin De Bruyne. All he’s got to do is bury this chance and you have a living, breathing, top level Pep Guardiola master class that you can show the world on YouTube. But he doesn’t. He absolutely beams it over the bar, but then it goes to penalties. And if you want to know the real reason why Man City lost this game, right, because they just didn’t learn, wind the clock back what feels like a million years to the Community Shield final. Manchester City are playing Arsenal. It goes to penalties. They lose that one as well. And Muggins here does a video looking at the amount of time City were giving themselves between the whistle being blown and the ball being kicked. The science people are obviously still doing the science behind this, but the working theory is that the longer you give yourself before striking the ball, the more you can get your breathing right. The more you can lower your heart rate, the better chance you give yourself of scoring that penalty. Arsenal just did it against Porto in the Champions League as well. It took way, way longer on average per kick and they were much better at doing it. Obviously it guarantees you absolutely nothing. Nothing guarantees you anything in this sport, that’s the beauty of it. But margins, margins matter, the little things you can do to give yourself the best possible chance of doing well, and Man City did not do that. They rushed two of their penalties and lo and behold they missed those two penalties. Like everybody who saw that Bernardo Silver penalty was like, what on earth? What on earth is he doing with that? But remember they couldn’t get the ball out of the crowd and he sort of like squabbled to get it back. Then he just put it down, hit the thing and lo and behold, it was just so. I’ve never seen a penalty like it. Like it wasn’t down the middle with any finesse or power. It was just like he was passing the ball to the goalkeeper and that was the difference. Man City with a better side by an absolute mile. But they missed the great chance they managed to carve out for themselves and then they squandered the opportunity they had with penalties and that’s the way it goes, I’m afraid. If it’s any consolation to you, a probable Manchester City fan, I do now think that you will go on to How can I phrase this dry bomb the league. But still it’s never nice to get eliminated from such a big competition. Now if you have enjoyed this video and you bloody well better half please, you consider subscribing to us here on 442 new subscribers. I’ll say it every single video. They really, really, really, really really do help us out. So we appreciate that absolutely, massively. And to the old subscribers as well. The OGS who’ve been here possibly even a year now, I love you too, but in a different way. New issue of the magazine out now it’s the Invincibles issue featuring an incredible cover story about Arsene Wenger. Side that never, ever lost a game in the Premier League that season and everybody likes as a result. It’s really good. Can’t believe I caught that. Like that. Anyway, that’s available from all good news agents. You should enjoy that. Get me on Twitter at Adam Cleary. CLERY and 442 socials are in the corner of the video. We have a cool newsletter that you can subscribe to in the description and I think that’s everything, which I now say at the end of everybody. One thing, that’s everything. I should learn or write it, that I should have it on notes, shouldn’t I? I’m rambling. Yes. Sorry, Man City. Vamos, Madrid and bye. That was it. That’s the word that we couldn’t find. Goodbye.