By watching last season’s Manchester City games, people could enjoy a well-organized and structured team, just like an Engineer would design it. All their position seemed to be well covered, with enough depth on the squad to cover all but the worst injury crisis, and some of his players had the quality enough to make it all the way to win the Premiership. Specially, Citizen’s offensive game was amazing, based on great coordinated plays and on many alternative ways of scoring (long shots, free kicks, etc).
Nevertheless, the great success of Pellegrini's offensive strategies had another secret weapon hiding behind: the presence of Fernandinho as a central midfielder playing altogether with Yaya Toure, added a great amount of forward running and excellent under pressure passing, so that the team could easily sum one more player to the already offensive bunch of strikers, forwards, wingers, playmakers and wing backs that usually take part of their attacking play.
However, this strategy proved to be wrong against better attacking and counter attacking teams. Like Barcelona showed in their February Champions League’s game in Etihad, nor Fernandinho neither Yaya have discipline enough to cover the zonal marking when the team loses the ball in attack, they both tend to participate in the offensive game, and that was not forgiven by the Catalans, and will not be forgiven by this season’s reinforced title contenders.
Will the new reinforcement Fernando have what it takes to cover the gap in the midfield?
Source: DSG
