Ruben Dias and Marc Guehi have not finished a game together since Ipswich, and that tells you more about Man City’s slump than any single error does.
A new word has crept into Enzo Maresca‘s vocabulary this week. The season, he keeps saying, is a marathon. It is a fair line for a head coach whose side flew out of the blocks, but it also explains a lot about why Manchester City look so much less sure of themselves now.
City won 10 of their first 11 games in all competitions, and the only defeat in that run came against Paris Saint-Germain. Since then the wheels have wobbled. The 3-2 win at RB Leipzig on Wednesday was their first victory in four matches, and they have shipped 14 goals in their last seven games.
Why does Maresca keep changing his Man City team?
Maresca has been unusually aggressive with rest. After the defeat at Aston Villa he gave five of his stars a holiday, along with permission to sit out the League Cup tie against Brighton. He had already said that Guehi and others needed a break after long campaigns last year.
The bigger picture is the calendar. City are in the top eight of the Champions League table and have a League Cup quarter-final at home to Bradford City to come, so a 65-game season is a real possibility. Maresca is trying to make sure his best players still have legs in February and March, when trophies are actually decided.
He has not hidden from it either. After the win in Leipzig, he explained why he keeps changing his team, saying: “We have so many good players that to go always with the same one I don’t think is correct.”
The Dias and Guehi numbers that matter
Here is the part that has not had enough attention. Dias and Guehi started six Premier League and Champions League games together up to and including the 3-0 win at Liverpool. City kept four clean sheets in those games and conceded just four goals.
Then it fell apart. Neither of them was at his best against PSG, and Dias was taken off at half-time. The Ipswich game that followed is the last time both of them completed 90 minutes together.
Since then, the pairing has barely existed:
- Guehi was rested for the AEK Athens game and the league meeting with Brighton.
- Dias was left out for the Carabao Cup tie and only came off the bench late in Leipzig.
- Guehi did not make it past half-time at Aston Villa.
A centre-back partnership lives on repetition. Two defenders who know each other’s runs, distances and habits make far fewer of the small mistakes that turn into goals. Take that away week after week, and nobody should be shocked when a backline that let in four goals in six games starts leaking two a match.
It is not only the defence
The same thing has happened in midfield. For the Ipswich game, Maresca swapped out his whole midfield to rest Elliot Anderson, Enzo Fernandez and Rayan Cherki. Fernandez is now under scrutiny in a midfield that has stopped working the way it did earlier in the season, and Gianluigi Donnarumma is one of several players who have made costly errors. Maresca has already said the goalkeeper’s mistakes are not a concern.
Is Man City’s form as bad as it looks?
Not quite, and that is the point worth making. Some of the problems were there in the early weeks too, they were simply hidden by winning. And plenty of players have dropped off individually. But a team that keeps changing its shape and personnel will not look as fluent as one that picks itself, and that has to be factored into any judgement on City’s recent results.
There is an obvious comparison. Pep Guardiola’s first City side won their first ten games in all competitions in 2016-17, yet he worried about them even then, and they fell well short in every competition. Maresca has said in public that this group can get much better. The risk is that his side ends up on the same path if the problems in both boxes are not fixed.
Verdict: Maresca’s marathon needs a sprint at Forest
The plan makes sense on paper. City cannot play 65 games with the same eleven, and Maresca is right to protect the players he needs most for the spring. But the marathon only works if they are still in touch when it matters, and saving legs cannot come at the cost of letting rivals disappear over the horizon.
That is why Saturday’s trip to Nottingham Forest, with kick-off at 17:30, matters so much. For us, the answer is simple: pick Dias and Guehi together, leave them there for a run of games, and let the partnership that kept four clean sheets in six get its rhythm back. Rotate the front line if he must. The back four needs a settled look again.
