Jon Mackenzie

You may have noticed that City struggled to deal with Man United’s build up on their right-hand side early in the game. Let’s tease out why...

Like a lot of teams in modern football, City like to press their opponents high up the pitch, often looking to go man-to-man to stop them from progressing the ball.

This means they sometimes have to push their full backs high up the field to stop their opponents from having a free player.

Over the course of the last few seasons, opponents have looked to target this weakness in City’s pressing structure by baiting their press high and then attacking the space the space left behind by the jumping full back.

Pochettino’s Chelsea did this especially well in the 4-4 draw last season.

No doubt because of this, Ruben Amorim looked to target the full-back-area weakness by playing Amad Diallo high in the right channel to exploit this space. (NB. the position of the other wide forward, Bruno Fernandes)

This meant that when City’s full back on the left, Matheus Nunes, joined the press, their centre backs were left isolated 1v1 against Diallo and Rasmus Hojlund in a lot of space...

This is obviously quite a risky way of playing against these sorts of profile of forwards, especially with a defence that has proven to be quite error-prone in recent weeks.

So very early on, Guardiola tweaked things a bit to try to lessen the amount of space around the two Man United forwards.

City were already using a fairly unusual 433 pressing shape against United's possession shape. All that Guardiola changed was the marking responsibilities of the players in this shape to match them up better to their opponents.

Now, rather than Nunes needing to jump up, Foden went across instead to cover the wing back.

Which meant that City went from this channel coverage early on in the game...

To this... with a spare man to add a level of protection around the two United forwards

This change took place around the 9th minute of the game and at first it felt a little ad hoc. Perhaps it had been trained for in the run up to the game but there were a few issues with it in the first half.

One of them was that Foden initially started out quite central before jumping to the press, which meant that sometimes he arrived at Mazraoui a little late.

Which because Jeremie Doku was expected to cover the middle when Foden went, led to situations like this...

In the first half, United didn't exploit these situations as well as they perhaps should but they still presented an easy way of giving up central progression...

So in the second half, Guardiola changed things up again, having Foden start out much wider, and having Doku be more careful about when he went or didn't...

This system worked much more functionally than the initial tweak. In fact, the only time it broke down was when Doku lost possession of the ball with Phil Foden in an aggressive attacking position, leading to the Fernandes chance.

So ironically enough, City's plan for keeping Amad quiet worked pretty well... Until it didn't...

But what is interesting about those moments is that in order to get an advantage against this structure, Amad had to move into more central areas.

So what do we learn? On the one hand, City's out of possession tweaks to make sure Amad was kept quiet in the channel were nicely finessed through the game and very nearly did enough... On the other hand, good players always find a way...

If you like this thread but want things to move more, why not try video! YT: https://youtube.com/shorts/llu... tt: @theathleticfc/video/7449062129371499808?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7384610459468793376 class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://www.tiktok.com/@theath... Insta (soon): https://www.instagram.com/thea...

I'm taking a few weeks off noticing over the Christmas period. I hope you've enjoyed these thread/videos over the calendar year. We'll be back in January with more noticing but until then peace out!