As Pep Guardiola and Manchester City ponder what might have been after their hopes of lifting Europe’s premier club competition were shattered on Wednesday, the Catalan will be sharpening his axe and ready to wield it on a squad that looks unbalanced and unprepared to topple the continent’s elite.
City’s dreams of securing the Uefa Champions League were left crushed by a hugely impressive and vastly underrated Monaco side at the last-16 stage. While Italy World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon said it was Leicester City his Juventus should look to avoid when the draw for the quarter-finals is made in Nyon on Friday, there will be plenty of groans among club dignitaries if their name is drawn alongside the principality side.
Guardiola said before the match City would attack their opponents despite holding a 5-3 advantage from the first leg. His thinking wasn’t so left-field when you consider Leonardo Jardim’s Ligue 1 buccaneers are the top scorers in Europe’s top five leagues this season with 126. The last time they failed to score at their Stade Louis II home was August 2015.
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But perhaps the reason for the manager urging – although by his own admission failing – his side to be cavalier was the realisation that a defence minus the muscle of Vincent Kompany was too frail to defend a two-goal advantage against a team packed with craft, ingenuity and lightning pace.
Neither Gael Clichy nor Aleksandar Kolarov are up to the required standard to operate as a top-level left-back. So Guardiola’s decision to play the pedestrian-slow Kolarov as a centre-back against an attack as quick as Monaco’s is even more baffling.
Guardiola has a fixation with challenging himself to take players who are superb in their preferred positions and making them just as exceptional in others. Yaya Toure was used as an unflappable centre-back to help secure the Catalan his first Champions League title at Barcelona in 2009, while Philipp Lahm, one of the most accomplished full-backs in world football, was recalibrated as a midfield metronome that kept the Bayern Munich machine all conquering during Guardiola’s three years in Bavaria.
Perhaps Guardiola envisaged Kolarov developing into a Sinisa Mihajlovic-type goalscoring defender. While the latter’s ability from a dead-ball made him a potent weapon for the likes of Lazio and Inter Milan, his fellow Serb is not in the same league.
Guardiola refused to blame his defence for City’s exit. On the balance of it – six goals scored, six conceded over 180 minutes – it is a fair argument. City’s goals aggregate would only have been good enough to send them through in three of the other seven last-16 ties.
While the manager should be commended for defending his players, making a case for the defence is now past the point of no return. An ageing and lop-sided squad is in need of an overhaul. The club will stick with John Stones, a player recruited for the princely sum of £47.5 million (Dh215.5m), but many of his fellow defenders can be upgraded in the summer transfer window when the club are sure to make even more funds available for transfers than Guardiola’s 2016/17 outlay of over £160m.
Kolarov, Clichy, Bacary Sagna, Eliaquin Mangala and Pablo Zabaletta may constitute more than 45 per cent of the defenders on City’s books, but all are on the wane and unable to help the club reach the next level.
Goalkeeper Claudio Bravo has disappointed since his arrival from Barcelona while midfielder Fabian Delph is no longer even a peripheral figure. Toure has shown he is still capable but at 33 and out of contract in the summer is unlikely to be retained.
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