Pep Guardiola has spent the past eight and a half years at Manchester City berating his team for playing forward too quickly, instead insisting on “the extra pass”.
The extra pass, of course, brings harmony to City’s game. It organises the team, it brings everybody into the correct position, it takes the sting out of matches that could otherwise get out of hand.
Just on Friday, he said this: “We have to pass the ball more. We want to run too quick, make the actions without ‘pausa’, without our composure. If you have the ball and don’t pass properly to your mate and then another one, everything is so difficult. You lose balls that normally didn’t happen in the past and you have to run more, (engage in) more duels, and we’re not great at that. Any team in the 20 in the Premier League are better than us. They are better.”
And yet in the 87th minute against Chelsea last night when Ilkay Gundogan, City’s pausa king of recent years, got possession in midfield and turned back to slow the game down, Guardiola was furious. He wanted the ball to go forward as quickly as possible.
Fortunately for the City manager, it found its way back to goalkeeper Ederson and he pinged it upfield. Kevin De Bruyne headed the ball on to Erling Haaland. He held off Levi Colwill and flicked it to Phil Foden, who ran clean through on goal, from his own half, to finish off a pretty uncharacteristic back-to-front City attack.
That was for City’s final goal of a 3-1 win. Their second had come 20 minutes earlier from another Ederson punt upfield. Haaland headed that one on for himself, successfully chased it, then lobbed a shot over stranded ’keeper Robert Sanchez, who got himself in an awful mess, into the net.
That was Ederson’s fifth assist in the Premier League, the joint-most by a goalkeeper since the competition was founded in the early 1990s. And it is not as if all of those have come in the last few weeks.
His first came in August 2018, when he clipped a ball, golf-like, over the top of Huddersfield’s high line for Sergio Aguero to run onto. In Haaland’s first season, 2022-23, he did basically the same thing to find the Norwegian, when Brighton had been causing City problems with man-to-man marking.
Other than Ederson’s passing ability, that should highlight one thing: Guardiola’s City will use the long ball when the chance presents itself. If you play against them with a high line, you are asking for it, and that has been the case since day one — Claudio Bravo was the first ’keeper to get an assist for Guardiola’s City, against Arsenal in the 2017-18 Carabao Cup final.
A few years down the line, City tried the direct approach this past midweek, as essentially the only response they had to Paris Saint-Germain’s aggressive man-to-man approach in the Champions League; with the French side pressing high, City put three or four players on the halfway line and tried to get the ball straight up there from Ederson. It actually led to their second goal and a 2-0 lead, but the Brazil international’s accuracy failed him after that and City, for various reasons, crumbled to a 4-2 defeat.
On Saturday, it was simply their best bet, which explains why Guardiola was so keen for the ball to go long. Chelsea’s press caused City problems in the first half; the Londoners were hard to play through, and Guardiola also said that his midfielders were too slow to spot debutant Omar Marmoush’s runs up front.
“He made incredible movements that players in the middle could not see,” Guardiola told Sky Sports, the game’s live broadcaster in the UK.
“I think Gundo, and Kova (Mateo Kovacic), and Bernie (Bernardo Silva), they should be more clever in the movements with the high line that Chelsea had. But it’s a question of time knowing each other. We don’t know the movements of him (Marmoush), the movement he likes. It needs time.”
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Guardiola also explained the shift to the longer approach from Ederson after the break.
“Second half, they were more aggressive than man-to-man,” he said in his press conference, explaining how Chelsea took a fully committed yet risky approach to pressing. “When it’s man-to-man and they jump to the ’keeper, you can make a two-against-one with the ’keeper. But when it doesn’t happen, you have to play (long ball to) Erling, because if you win that ball it is a chance.
“We also played man-to-man, they played some balls to (Noni) Madueke and when they win it’s a (goal-scoring) action. Most of the teams do that and today we were brilliant to read that situation.”
What Guardiola is saying is that when a team are pressing you man-to-man, you can at least create some advantage by using your goalkeeper (who cannot be marked, because it would leave somebody else free), thus giving you some space to play. But because Chelsea were so aggressive in their approach yesterday, essentially the only (and best) option was to use Haaland’s strength, power and speed.
“Of course there were five or 10 minutes in the second half when the game was up and down, up and down,” Guardiola continued, stressing that he is not letting his team get away with risky passes. “With that, we are the worst team.
“It’s simple. Gundogan (at age 34) doesn’t have legs to go 40 metres, Bernardo (who is 30) doesn’t have the legs. We don’t have it. That’s why you have to make it with more ‘pausa’. Maybe it’s less attractive, but it works for us.”
It is true that the slower style has not always sat well with the supporters, even during City’s best days, but it is always going to be the go-to approach for Guardiola in most games, when opponents sit back. That is when he says his team needs to slow down and “take a coffee” by playing extra passes.
At their best, City have tried to play through teams who press them aggressively with short passes, but they have also learnt to go more direct in the past couple of years and perhaps now, with Guardiola admitting that their “process is not good” when it comes to a stable build-up, it would essentially be counter-productive to play into that pressure. The result of all of that is the type of long balls seen in the second half of these past two games against PSG and Chelsea.
Haaland cut a frustrated figure on Wednesday night at the Parc des Princes, as he repeatedly asked for the ball to be played to him, only to see his team-mates struggle to find him with it. Three days later he had plenty of service, and he revelled in it.
“It is something we practice,” the Norwegian told the BBC after the Chelsea match. “We try to focus on giving space and then Ederson gave me a lot of assists already. It is about perfect timing because he is so precise.”
Guardiola also brought De Bruyne on yesterday with 16 minutes of the 90 remaining to play a specific part in the long-ball ploy: whenever City went long from the back, the Belgian seemed to be instructed to follow the flight of the ball and be ready to pounce when it dropped, no doubt with the aim of then finding Haaland with a through ball.
Another interesting dynamic was the use of Marmoush. The Egyptian, newly arrived from Germany’s Eintracht Frankfurt, started the game playing off the left wing but was instructed to come inside when City attacked, with Josko Gvardiol taking the role out wide.
This meant that Marmoush offered plenty of runs in behind, ones that Guardiola says his new team-mates largely missed, but on one occasion he also linked up perfectly with Haaland from a second-half long ball. The pass to a surging Foden run was a difficult next option and instead he took on a shot which veered wide.
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This is not something we can expect to see from City every week, because as soon as they come up against a deep-lying defence it will be back to the pausa and “taking a coffee”.
But when teams leave those kinds of spaces, are brave enough to press high up the pitch and do not block Ederson, they will have to look out for the threat in behind.
City have their problems this season but carry plenty of threat in those situations.
(Top photo: Carl Recine/Getty Images)
