Guilty Rodri, Spurs, FIFA and old delays

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Manchester City are having some fun. They’ve now lost five games in a row, and internet law requires us to come up with five reasons why that’s the case – no more, no less.

And these are them.

Rodri’s injury
The starting point is clear but the numbers are completely crazy. It is neither an exaggeration nor an oversimplification to point out that City never lose when Rodri is playing, but often when he is not, that he has not been with the team since September and is almost certain to be absent for the rest of the season.

Which means you shrug your shoulders and say, “Yeah, he’s really good at football, isn’t he?” you can say. For Guardiola and his team, this option is not available. They need to find an actual real world solution to minimize the impact of this loss or their season will be over very quickly.

It’s now safe to say that using Ilkay Gundogan and his aging legs (more on that later) in an innovative, deep signaling role as he frantically points to confused team-mates at the exact location of whatever threat is racing past him won’t get it done it seems. ‘it seems to be working, so it may need some new thinking.

Regardless of their position, there are very few teams that can cope without that one player who ties it all together – look at Arsenal with and without Martin Odegaard in the last few weeks, for example – but no matter how well-known the team is. It has become a truly staggering phenomenon that any player can make such a huge difference to the fortunes of a strong and successful club like City.

Rodri out this season: Seven injuries have made Premier League title race more interesting

Ruben Dias and Other Injuries
Ruben Dias and Other Injuries As well as playing in a legendary set-piece at Reading in ’92, he also represents an obvious point of concern for City.

There’s a solid case to be made that – and we’re specifically talking about the absolute brutality of the performance against Spurs at the weekend – Rodri isn’t even the most damaging missing piece of the puzzle.

Even without Rodri, they managed to make some progress after the Arsenal game, producing a few results here and there – often unconvincingly, of course – before the wheels fell off. The loss of Wheels came at the same time as the easy loss of top defender Ruben Dias.

City have not conceded four goals in any of their 169 Premier League and Champions League matches with the club. They have done so twice in four games in his current absence. And they barely held on for a defensive victory in the other two.

There have been strange absences at various points from Kevin De Bruyne, Nathan Ake, Phil Foden and Jack Grealish, and the squad that Guardiola likes to keep small by design has stretched beyond its elastic limits.

Everyone has injuries, but Dias, Rodri and De Bruyne are literally the ‘backbone of the team’ kind of thing.

Old lags and young coins
And you wonder how much those first two numbers depend on the makeup of City’s squad. The average age of 27.8 doesn’t seem that bad, but it’s a deceptive average. Because there are very few players in City’s squad at the top of 24-29. Especially when you take Rodri and Dias out of the already underrepresented group. Of course, Erling Haaland and Phil Foden are still 24, but they both have their own struggles now compared to the absurdly high level they have.

Most of the key players remaining in this squad are young or old. And leaning too far towards the old head. De Bruyne is 33 years old. Gündoğan and Kyle Walker are 34. Bernardo Silva, John Stones and Mateo Kovacic are also 30 years old.

At the other end of the scale, great demands and responsibility are placed on the shoulders of your Josko Gvardiols, Rico Lewises and Savinhos of this world. They are all quality young players, but a lot is expected from them.

The problem of having lots of youngsters and lots of old warhorses but not much in between will be familiar to anyone who has tried captaining a village cricket team. It seems like a careless situation for the country’s most successful football club to find itself in.

TO READ: Premier League winners and losers: Postecoglou, O’Neil, Amorim, Leicester, Man City, Everton and more

overwork
If you gave us more opportunities to put on those old retrospection glasses… maybe this was always going to happen. Perhaps this was always going to be a strange, unpredictable season; something that will never serve City well given the metronomic nature of their success. Perhaps all the international football that has been squeezed into the schedule over the last few years, through the combination of the Covid-postponed 2020 tournaments and the 2022 Winter World Cup, has had to catch up with people sooner or later.

And City will always be vulnerable to this, given a) the sheer number of players involved in football and b) the thin squad Guardiola likes to maintain.

Nine members of City’s squad have played 1,000 minutes of club football alone this season; Ruben Dias suffered an injury four minutes before this goal, leaving Gündoğan just a few minutes behind. They may indeed be a team out of breath, at least for now.

We played Tottenham twice
Let’s not make the situation more complicated than it needs to be. There’s no escaping the fact that 40% of Manchester City’s five-game losing streak has come against Tottenham, who we know are the stupidest football team in the world.

One of the best and also stupidest things about Tottenham is the fact that they are absolute Kryptonite for Manchester City. They have a much better record against them under Guardiola than would make sense.

He faced Spurs 22 times during Guardiola’s time. Spurs won nine of those games, drew three and lost just 10. It’s absurdly even considering the relative success of the teams during this period, with City winning almost every trophy and Spurs winning none. It certainly didn’t feel like much of a win, especially considering the fact that one of City’s 10 ‘wins’ was 4-3 in the Champions League quarter-final second leg.

The great irony of course is that, in the midst of a terrible run of form for almost every other team, there is no more refreshing and encouraging sight than Dr Tottenham’s arrival in town. The situation is exactly the opposite for City, the best and most successful team of the era. They would literally rather face someone else on Saturday night. We don’t need to explain it, we can’t, we just need to accept its truth.

TO READ: 16 Results on Man City 0-4 Spurs: disgusting Walker and Gundogan, magnificent Kulusevski and Maddison