Looking back, clues to this final system had been there all season.<\/p>\n
Doku’s one-against-one threat on the left had required teams to double up on him since August. O’Reilly’s runs began to bear fruit as early as September. <\/p>\n
Silva’s intelligent pressing and build-up helped mitigate City’s areas of weakness from November onwards. <\/p>\n
Haaland and Semenyo moving in-field as Nunes pushed up to provide width, supplied by the two-footed Cherki, gave City solutions teams were unable to prepare for.<\/p>\n
Behind them, Khusanov’s pace provided City with a get-out-of-jail free card when they held their high line.<\/p>\n
Their press evolved too. Guardiola tried several versions through the year before settling on one where the wingers pressed centre-backs while blocking passes wide, with Haaland and Cherki blocking the middle of the pitch. Those roles suited the more physical wingers and protected the less defensive Haaland and Cherki.<\/p>\n
City were compact and Silva and Rodri swept up any second balls too.<\/p>\n
A common myth in football is that “playing like Guardiola” is creating a side that looks like Barcelona did in 2009.<\/p>\n
Guardiola has admitted that he wins because of the players he has which is partly down to City’s ability to spend big. <\/p>\n
His ability to continually reinvent his squads in response to the players he has available and the tactical trends of the league, however, remains second to none.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking back, clues to this final system had been there all season. Doku’s one-against-one threat on the left…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-549684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}