Weary City lacking usual spark
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Manchester City’s weary players boarded a plane to France yesterday, the southern city of Marseille being the latest stop on their gruelling and seemingly interminable fixture schedule in a pandemic-disrupted season like no other.
There will have been no senior strikers on the flight, with Sergio Aguero injured again and joining Gabriel Jesus back in the treatment room.
Star midfielder Kevin De Bruyne will be on board, recently back from injury and fresh from protestations about the workload being forced on soccer players this season.
Whether Aymeric Laporte, City’s defensive lynchpin, will play in the UEFA Champions League match at the Stade Velodrome today is in the balance after his run of fitness issues.
“I try to demand everything from my players,” City manager Pep Guardiola said at the weekend, “but there is a limit for human beings.”
Sympathy is usually in short supply when it comes to City and the debate over workload and fixture congestion.
“It’s the richest club in the world,” is a typical retort. And most would say it’s a perfectly reasonable one, given City spent more than 100 million pounds (US$130 million) on two center backs in the offseason, one of whom is purely seen a back-up.
Yet, it is hard to escape the fact that City’s performances have rarely looked flatter and more predictable under Guardiola than they have since the start of the season.
In short, being the busiest team in English soccer in recent years appears to be taking its toll.
A 1-1 draw at West Ham United in the English Premier League on Saturday has left City in 13th place and on eight points — its lowest tally after five games since 2014.
Only five teams have scored fewer goals in the EPL than City’s eight, so even an attack that season after season creates more chances than any other team is misfiring by its usual high standards.
Of course, it doesn’t help when Guardiola is without a recognized striker — Jesus got injured in the first game of the season, and Aguero has broken down three games into his return from four months out — but there’s more to it than that.
“We don’t have enough preparation in our legs throughout the whole squad,” the City manager said, referring to the fact his players had an offseason just two weeks long owing to the late finish to last season because of its involvement in the last eight of the UCL in August.
“Of course, it’s too much,” he added while raising concerns about the “mental state” of some of the players. “It’s not more difficult to understand than this.”
City is coming off a 54-week campaign in the 2019-20 season that was interrupted by the three-month suspension because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Over the past two seasons, the team has played 120 games in all competitions — more than any other in England’s top flight. This season, which started a month later than normal, City has been playing a match every three or four days aside from the international breaks, and will continue to do so until January. Even when club soccer stops for internationals, players can feature in as many as three games for their countries, potentially in a six-day span.
“Your body is screaming out for a rest but nobody listens to the players,” De Bruyne said in a Sky Sports interview during the most recent international break, when he picked up a muscle injury. “Everyone says, ‘They earn good money, they’ve just got to manage.’ And that’s it, I can put up with those comments.
“(But) I can see a wave of injuries coming for a lot of players, trust me. I always give 100 percent, I can’t play at 80 percent.”
City has at least made a winning start to its UCL group. And, despite its slow start in the league, could only be two points off the lead if the team wins its game in hand.
Guardiola is into his fifth, and possibly last, year in charge and hasn’t given any clues over whether he intends to stay beyond his season.
If he is to add to his collection of trophies won at City since 2016, don’t expect them to come easily this season.
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