After all these months, have Manchester City finally turned the corner and put their troubles behind them?
According to Pep Guardiola, the answer is… kind of, yeah. And the answers may even have been discovered at the very place where the rot crept in in the first place: Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium.
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City were played off the pitch for the vast majority of a 2-1 defeat at the hands of Bournemouth in November, the first league defeat of a bad run that lasted three to four months and is arguably not yet over.
Their stumbling quest for Champions League qualification seemed to be taking another battering when they went 2-0 down to Crystal Palace on Saturday, but a five-goal fightback put three vital points on the board and offered more proof to Guardiola and his players that maybe things are getting better after all — up to a point, but possibly enough to get into the top five all the same.
“I’m optimistic to finish well this season,” Guardiola said on Friday. “Some spirit is back. The spirit is there. The spirit will sustain us.”
It was a message echoed by Ilkay Gundogan, one of City’s captains, in a separate interview.
“I feel in a lot of games, maybe we gave a bit too much importance to tactics and didn’t really pay attention much on behaviour of ourselves,” he told TNT Sport ahead of the Palace game. “Having that determination, desire, aggression.
“In the last few games, I see a certain change, especially that very uncomfortable game against Bournemouth in the FA Cup. Maybe people don’t give much credit to that (spirit) because people, especially in our society and also football society, tend to credit more a beautiful goal, beautiful assist, beautiful actions.
“Sometimes, you maybe drift apart a bit from these things, but honestly I have to say since the international break in March, since we came back, I see an improvement in that area.”
After City had swept past Oliver Glasner’s side, thanks to goals from five different players, Guardiola was speaking about the number of other chances his side had created.
“That is the way we have done it for many years, it’s the way we have to do it,” he said, but then he got onto what might just be the main point.
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“Run, solidarity. Again, since the Bournemouth game in the FA Cup, we are back in those terms.”
It appears that ahead of their return to Bournemouth for the FA Cup quarter-final a fortnight ago, Guardiola revisited the November defeat and was, five months later, able to put his finger on most of the things that have ailed them since.
“I think the Bournemouth game, we were able, both me and the team, to put the mirror in front of us,” he said on Saturday. “Watching the game against Bournemouth when we lost the first game in the Premier League this season, reviewing the game, I said, ‘Wow’. I saw the reason why we had the season that we had.
“We talked about that, we saw that, and after… the problem is identifying the problem, realising there is a problem and after that move forward and try to find a solution.”
Guardiola had given an insight into that process after winning the cup game in March.
“We talked a lot and we saw a lot of images that were not in our standards, nowhere near what we have been to win six Premier Leagues in seven years and we just focused and said, ‘Guys, without that, we cannot… it doesn’t matter if we play today without wingers, sometimes with wingers, there’s a minimum requirement that we have to show respect for your mates, you have to make an effort’, and today we did it.”
De Bruyne played a starring role against Palace (Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
City defender Josko Gvardiol talked after that about Guardiola’s impassioned team talk ahead of the game and it seems that focus on togetherness, team spirit, winning duels and all of those uglier elements would have been the focus.
“Maybe it took a lot of time to realise that,” Guardiola reflected on Saturday, and it does seem alarming from the outside that it needed a glance back at the very start of a run — one that has included defeats by Real Madrid, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Juventus, Aston Villa, Paris Saint-Germain, Tottenham Hotspur and Brighton & Hove Albion — for the penny to drop.
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Guardiola and his players have been bogged down in the seemingly never-ending cycle of setbacks this season, and perhaps it needed the spring international break and the FA Cup draw to provide a bit of clarity.
Even so, Guardiola does acknowledge City are not there yet. As he has often said, they will not get back to their very best level this season. That has become obvious.
“Since then (Bournemouth)… at Old Trafford it was not good, the game was boring, but we fought, this is the part that we have to have every time. After, could you play better? OK, we will improve.
“We saw the game against United’s five at the back, the spots we should occupy that we didn’t do there, and today we did it a little better and thanks to that we can create chances.”
So the fundamentals of running and fighting are seemingly back, and that does provide City with the opportunity to improve everything else.
After the draw at Old Trafford, Guardiola said his team needed to run less, not more, and that they were not in the right positions.
“It’s so simple,” he explained on Friday. “When you move the ball, you move the opponent. When you move the opponent, you create spaces to attack. When that space is not occupied by the right players in the right positions, you cannot attack good.”
And before he even got into all the Bournemouth/spirit chat post-match on Saturday, he talked about how they built on last weekend’s difficulties to see off Palace.
“After Kevin’s goal, with the momentum we scored two. In the second half, we adjusted one or two things — we were more in the position, you have to move teams right, left. Left, right. Right, left. Left, right. If you want to attack a little bit quicker, you are in trouble.
“With that, look how many chances we created. We scored five goals, but I remember three for (James) McAtee in front of the keeper, two for Omar (Marmoush), one for Kevin, clear chances in front of the ’keeper. That is the way we have done it for many years, it’s the way we have to do it.”
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You have already heard what he said in the very next breath: “Run, solidarity. Again, since the Bournemouth game in the FA Cup, we are back in those terms.”
These things are all connected, and if City have re-established those fundamentals, they may finally be on the road to recovery.
(Top photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
