It would be completely fair to say that the career of John Stones has never quite kicked on at City. Now, this is not due to a lack of endeavor or commitment from Stones. The lad has sometimes been hit with issues beyond his control. There were many instances when he would have a wonderful first part of the season. But, he would be injured for the remainder of the...
In a way, the start to this season had a cloud of mystery around it. It was after quite a while that we were going to play with a recognized number 9. The questions and doubts were all about how much time would Haaland take to adapt to City’s style of play. There were quite a few pundits who were even confident about Haaland not making it in a faster...
I have never thought that i would ask this question anywhere in the near future. Only a week back, it seemed as if we were ever close to a defensive crisis. With Walker limping off against Villa and Pep stating that Laporte will take longer than expected, it seemed all doom and gloom. Add to all this, the amount of goals we were conceding, it was just a matter of...
I can visualize Pep sitting quietly in his office and thinking about the lack of patterns and combinations yesterday. It looked like we were suffocating ourselves with the way we were set up. Space and width have always been the fundamental tenets of every Pep team. But, strangely this season Pep seems to have moved into a more vertical based approach. His desire to dominate the middle of the pitch...
Transfer windows are never really a benchmark to judge Pep Guardiola. In fact, when the window doesn’t go well, it motivates Pep to innovate and take the game to an other level. Last season we went for Harry Kane and put in bid after bid till the very end. When we didn’t get him, all our rivals went hammer and tongs stating that City without a striker would struggle. Well,...
It’s an almost impossible task to understand Pep’s thinking. Whenever it seems that we have finally got a grip on what goes inside his mind, he continues to prove us wrong. The squad selection for the Champion’s league final was a big example of how crazy his decisions can go. May be it’s this craziness that separates Pep from all the others in the world. My intention here is not...
It would be insane for me not to start the article with Erling Haaland. All the talk in the Premier League circles is how do we even get close to him. The attributes of Raw strength combined with extreme agility is very rare and makes Haaland a phenomenon. I am quite sure that Haaland torments defenders in their most beautiful dreams as well. Such is the fear he injects into...
The adage goes that you need to have a certain profile to play as a Center Back in a Pep Guardiola team. You just need to look at the kind of Center Backs Pep has worked with over the course of his managerial career to understand the character and courage it takes to defend wide open spaces at the back. Despite having fit backup center backs on the bench, Pep...
Lodi signed for Nottingham Forest….What??…. I just could not believe the information. I had to double check it. It just didn’t make sense that a player who was playing regular Champions League football would join a team that was not even guaranteed top division survival. I know it’s just a loan deal, but again it defies logic to me. He is not even on that high of a wages for...
The matches between Newcastle and Crystal Palace have a lot in common. But the one thing that delivered victory in the Palace game was Pep Guardiola’s change of formation to a back 3 and throwing all of his attackers on to the pitch. This might seem like an obvious move from Pep, specially when we have been chasing the game against a rigid Palace defense. But, when he made those...
