Daniel Storey: Can Pep Guardiola flick the switch on Man City's dimming lights?
DO I NOT LIKE THAT: Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola can’t do anything but watch Tottenham put his side to the sword in the Premier League on Saturday. He has a big job on his hands this season. Picture: Clive Rose
The only surprise is that people continue to be surprised. Tottenham were longer than 3/1 with some bookmakers to beat a team comfortably below them in the table who had failed to score more than once in any of their last five league games.
The Manchester City starting XI on Saturday contained Riyad Mahrez and Bernardo Silva, both desperately out of form, and at least three other players scratching around for it. More problematic than City’s profligacy is the noticeable drop in their pressing. They hound opponents in single units rather than as a cohesive mass, allowing proficient opponents to play through their midfield and expose the defence.
Tottenham’s opener was embarrassingly easy to create - two passes and a finish past an out-of-position goalkeeper. Pep Guardiola signed a new contract extension this week to dissuade any suspicion that he had grown weary of this underperformance, but that doesn’t offer any solution to it.
An in-form, consistently available top-class centre forward would surely help mask many of City’s nagging issues, but even that might not make them a title challenger. Guardiola has a job on his hands.
The story of Brighton’s season was a lack of exactness in both thirds of the pitch. They created chances and played aesthetically pleasing, passing football, but were guilty of missing presentable chances to kill off games and were then undone by defensive lapses.
So of course they won in totally the opposite way, outshot by Aston Villa on Saturday but winners thanks to two superb finishes from half-chances from Danny Welbeck and Solly March. They survived a piece of late VAR drama, but Graham Potter might conclude that his side were owed a little good fortune.
Potter will be acutely aware of the magnitude of three points before fixtures against Liverpool, Southampton and Leicester. A five-point cushion from the bottom four allows them to attack those opponents with the pressure relieved.
We worried a little for Abraham’s chances of keeping his place in Chelsea’s first-team after the arrival of three attackers in the summer. With Christian Pulisic and Kai Havertz to come back into the side when fit, Timo Werner may well move back into a central role and demote Abraham to the bench.
But Abraham is making himself undroppable on current form. While Werner laboured for long periods (although his contribution to Chelsea’s second was vital), Abraham linked up play and took his chance with far greater accomplishment than the German’s snatched first-half shot.
Abraham now has five goals and four assists in his last five Chelsea starts. Frank Lampard hoped that the increase in competition for places would spark a response from a striker whose form tailed off after Christmas last season. That’s exactly what it has provoked.
"We got off to an awful start against a very good Chelsea team and unfortunately we went far too deep in the first half,” was Steve Bruce’s assessment of another miserable Newcastle United performance during which they barely tried to lay a glove on Chelsea until they were trailing by one goal and deserved to be out of the contest.
Bruce’s problem is that this was not a one-off, even if he referenced the strength of Newcastle’s opponents. In per-game terms, they rank 19th or 20th in the Premier League for shots, shots on target, touches in the opposition box and passes in the final third. Their recent fixture list has indeed been tough, but Bruce sets his team up in roughly the same way every week.
Bruce also claimed post-game that the lack of match-going supporters was hampering Newcastle, but that works both ways. Had those fans been present on Saturday they would surely have lambasted such a risk-averse, unadventurous approach.
We are not present to watch Premier League teams train, and so we must assume that there were valid reasons for Scott Parker to leave André-Frank Zambo Anguissa, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Aleksandar Mitrovic on the bench on Sunday. Fatigue post-internationals is certainly one possible factor, although Loftus-Cheek was not called up by England.
But seeing how the game changed in Fulham’s favour after the introduction of all three substitutes and how Fulham subsequently dominated the midfield battle and pushed for an undeserved equaliser, you do wonder whether Parker just got his initial calls wrong. The suspicion is growing that there might well be the nucleus of a side at Craven Cottage capable of avoiding relegation, but that it might require a more experienced manager to secure it.
It isn’t Nicolas Pepe’s fault that he was signed for £70m, creating immediate expectations that were always going to prove hard to match during his first season. There’s no doubt that he underachieved during his first year, but there were extenuating circumstances. But that doesn’t excuse incidents like Sunday, when Pepe reacted to an innocuous coming together by planting his head into Ezgjan Alioski’s and receiving the most obvious red card given VAR’s assistance.
Having spent weeks pushing for first-team starts, it was a sensationally braindead move. Not only will Mikel Arteta be wary of picking Pepe again, he should also be telling Arsenal to dock him a fortnight’s wages.
