Manchester City: Pep’s choice not to start Aguero for Barca mind-boggling
Pep Guardiola’s tactics and team selection were unbelievably poor for Wednesday’s Manchester City against Barcelona bout.
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After the 4-0 defeat for Manchester City at the Camp Nou to Barcelona, I’ve had some time to think about and process the bizarre match: injuries proliferated; red cards brandished for both sides; each team threatened though only one managed to score thanks to a handful of bad, really bad mistakes.
Probably the worst of these on-field screw-ups — and it’s hard to beat Fernandinho‘s slip to the ground and his subsequent lack of scrambling to his feet to recover before Lionel Messi sprinted 15 yards to take advantage — was Claudio Bravo and his “handsy” misadventure 30 yards from goal. It resulted in his ejection, and it sealed City’s defeat, having now to play both a man down and from behind.
While these failures are obvious, they overshadow the fact that Pep Guardiola‘s game plan was doomed to fail from the start. First and foremost is talisman Sergio Aguero‘s omission from the starting lineup. This is the second game in a row that the Argentine, City’s best player, was withheld. It’s unclear if this is because of some injury, or Guardiola is unhappy with Aguero’s contribution in possession as in the same uncompromising manner he was unhappy with Joe Hart‘s low pass completion percentage with his feet.
Guardiola claimed Aguero’s benching was purely for tactical reasons. During a press conference, he dismissed the notion that there is some rift between him and Aguero; in a nevertheless ambiguous statement, the manager said: “When Sergio decides to leave Manchester City, it will be his decision.”
Even so, Guardiola preferring an extra midfielder to his world class striker in the hopes of holding possession and strangling Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar — essentially, to out-Barca Barca — seems so foolishly naive and misguided it beggars belief that a tactical mind like Guardiola’s could actually accept it.
There were other ways to reinforce the middle without sacrificing Aguero, namely, playing with a back three and moving an extra body into the middle of the park. Admittedly, this move bears a lot of risk, leaving three out-of-form defenders to deal with Barca’s peerless front three. But so does deploying mistake-prone Pablo Zabaleta and Aleksandar Kolarov against them.
Likewise, Aguero’s very presence, coupled with Kevin De Bruyne prowling behind him, could have forced Sergio Busquets to drop deeper to negate their threat pushing forward, forcing the duo of Ivan Rakitic and Andres Iniesta to contend with the trio of David Silva, Ilkay Gundogan and Fernandinho. Jordi Alba’s early withdrawal due to a knock he picked up likely would have contributed to Busquets staying closer to home too. Domination in possession might have been achieved in this way.
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But none of this came to pass because Aguero was not on the pitch, and De Bruyne was hopelessly isolated playing as the false 9. Yet, Guardiola confessed that he’d rather quit than take a hard look at his idealism and amend his philosophy. Fine, but even if Wednesday’s comedy of errors that directly led to defeat never occurred, his stratagems for the match inspired no confidence for reasonable belief in victory.
As such, neither do his excuses for sheathing his sharpest sword in Aguero. Indeed, underneath it all, something smells rotten at the Etihad.