Manchester City’s weaknesses under Enzo Maresca are being exposed

Enzo Maresca seemed, if not quite baffled by his side’s Saturday defeat to Nottingham Forest, then at least a little put out. After seven straight wins from the start of the season, that’s now three straight defeats, a pattern so unusual that it’s been recorded only once before in top-flight English history, by Sheffield Wednesday in 1904-05. The three defeats were all different, Maresca said, although in all of them City had had more possession and more chances.

In the 2-1 defeat at Aston Villa two weeks ago, City had 63% of the ball and had 15 chances to Villa’s eight. In the 1-0 home defeat to Brighton last weekend, they had 62% possession and 21 chances to seven. At the City Ground, it was 79% possession and 12 chances to 11. So Maresca is right in one way: City could look at basic statistics and say they had been unfortunate – although Forest could equally point to the fact that they went into that game third top of the expected goals table but second-bottom of the actual table.

But there is another statistic that should concern Maresca: City have not kept a clean sheet since their victory at Anfield after the last international break, nine games ago. And the game before that, they let in three against Sunderland. In those last eight games, City have conceded 17 goals. It’s true that three of those can at least in part be blamed on errors by Gianluigi Donnarumma, but there are also structural issues. City have a vulnerability in transition that Forest ruthlessly exploited, a weakness not unfamiliar to Maresca’s teams. One of the criticisms he received at both Leicester and Chelsea was that his sides were often extremely cautious in possession, but that makes sense given how high a line he likes to play.

That’s also why duels are so crucial to his teams; losing possession immediately exposes a high back four. Maresca was visibly disappointed at the way City were outfought in the first half against Forest. Lose the ball and the opposition has a run at a back four with space behind it. That is always going to be a problem but especially so when the opposing center-forward is a Liam Delap who has just remembered how to play and is determined to make somebody pay for a year and a bit of disappointing form.

Yet the midfield Maresca picked was clearly vulnerable to being outmuscled. He clearly rates Enzo Fernández extremely highly, to the point that City paid £125m ($167.7m) to sign him from Chelsea. But Fernández, for all his gifts as a footballer, is not especially physical by the standards of the Premier League. When he and Cole Palmer played together, there was often a sense that it made Chelsea a little lightweight. Maresca, though, was so determined to field the Argentinian that he would come up with complex tactical solutions, such as using Malo Gusto as a weird right-back-cum-No-10 hybrid.

City are running into similar problems. Rayan Cherki is an enormously gifted attacking midfielder, but not one who can be relied upon defensively, either in terms of his positioning or his willingness to make tracking runs, something Pep Guardiola acknowledged last season. He can be physically outmatched. That is not necessarily a huge problem with two mobile runners behind him: ideally an Elliot Anderson-style shuttler and a more defensive holding and/or ball-winning presence like Rodri. But Rodri has gone and Fernández leaves Anderson with a huge amount of the physical work to do. If Anderson happens not to be on the spot – if, say, a defender loses the ball in a dangerous area, or a break bypasses him – City are very quickly exposed.

Maresca said he will use this international break to reassess, that this was a rare example where it was better for a team not to have another game straight away to try to put a defeat behind them. Perhaps there is a tactical solution to be found. Perhaps even one that isn’t just: don’t play Fernández and Cherki together. But he must also be aware that by the time the Premier League returns, City could be out of the title race, or effectively even out of the Premier League itself.

It was during the last international break that the independent panel announced City had been found guilty of all but one of the charges brought against them by the Premier League. There is a school of thought that the sanctions could be announced during this international break. It’s all but impossible, of course, to know precisely how it’s affecting players to play under the cloud of a potential huge points deduction, but if initial defiance has faded into a sullen acceptance, that may also lead to battles being lost, to a lack of intensity and desire.

The issue is tactical, but it may not only be tactical.