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After Manchester City’s second goal came in, with 12 minutes remaining, Andre Villas-Boas decided to bring in Dimitri Payet. He was always a tactical genius.
So it wasn’t just that Marseille stumbled upon Manchester City’s best performance of the season so far, it was more than invited to deliver it. Villas-Boas knocked out some of his best players – not just Payet but Morgan Sanson as well – to better contain City and it was one goal less in 18 minutes.
So that was plan A done. Plan B was not much better, sadly. More caution, more men behind the ball. A lame attempt to get back into the game after the break.
This of course gave Manchester City more space and as Pep Guardiola had madly chosen to display his most creative talents, they took advantage of it. A second came in at 78 minutes, then a third at 81.
Had another seven followed, it could have encapsulated the gap between these teams in terms of ambition, even more than talent. We will never know what game Marseille could have given Manchester City, because they were not allowed to play it.
Villas-Boas appeared to be fighting another Manchester City. One that had not been beaten 5-2 at home by Leicester and had a stuttering start to the season; or had not lost to Lyon a few months ago in the knockout phase of the Champions League.
City is a good team, and you looked at it here, but they were allowed to be in their prime, dominating all facets of the game, passing, passing, passing the opposition into oblivion.
Why Marseille settled like this, God knows. The last time they were in the group stage of the Champions League, in 2013-14, they lost all six games. They are on their way to repeating that here.
Returning to the last stages of the 2011-12 edition, there are now 11 consecutive defeats in the Champions League. One would have imagined that a coach would have shown ambitions to break this streak in his first home game.
It’s an irony that if Payet had stayed at West Ham, he might have had a chance to start a match against Manchester City this year. Once his name wasn’t among the initial XIs, the game played out as expected.
Attack against defense. One team with 11 behind the ball, the other probing and passing relentlessly, dominating possession, rhythm and play. Marseille were as desperately disappointing as Paris St Germain had been against another Manchester team seven days earlier.
We thought PSG was going to be a Manchester United game and we were desperately disappointed; We expected Marseille to show at least a small ticker at home and we were equally disappointed.
The team card suggested Villas-Boas’ warning and the action confirmed it. Marseille had a remarkable shot in the 90 minutes, by Florian Thauvin, and it says a lot about Ederson’s lack of participation that he almost spilled it and the ball brushed a post.
Meanwhile, at the opposite extreme, Marseille firmly stuck to his duty, but occasionally panic seized him as the tension of it all showed. Such an event led to the opening goal after 18 minutes.
In the midst of a frenzied cleaning, Valentin Rongier tried a pass to the wing position. It was misdirected and instead fell to Kevin De Bruyne. Could he have had a worse opponent at an advantage?
The answer came quickly when De Bruyne responded with a pass that Ferran Torres, who scored a false nine for the night in the absence of several forwards, edged goalkeeper Steve Mandanda.
It was his second goal of this Champions League campaign, in his second European appearance. The last Manchester City player to score in his first two games at this tournament was Mario Balotelli. Torres resisted the urge to ask the obvious question.
Why always him? Perhaps because of the way Marseille was established, anyone on Manchester City’s front row was likely to see a lot of the ball around the goal. De Bruyne had a deflected volley in the second minute. From the resulting corner, Ruben Dias headed a close header.
The pressure was relentless, but it was difficult to get close to goal through the multitude of white jerseys. “Quick, quick,” ordered Pep Guardiola, an instruction that needs little translation. In his defense, his players were going as fast as they could. In the 14th minute, Phil Foden forced a save and, approaching half-time, a terrible control by Leonardo Belardi allowed Torres to put Oleksandr Zinchenko ahead, whose shot went wide from the far post.
It is the credit of Marseille, then, that City had to wait until minute 76 to feel completely safe. Foden dropped one shoulder and accelerated to the left. He hit a deep cross that Raheem Sterling crossed back into goal; and Ilkay Gundogan was there to confirm the result. Immediately, the game now lost, Villas-Boas brought in Payet. It was a pathetic sight.
Delighted, then, that Manchester City highlights the truth of these 90 minutes with a third party. Riyad Mahrez slipped the ball to De Bruyne, whose center caught Sterling for a tap-in. It seemed easy. By then, it was. However, getting there required an admirable effort.
It’s not easy, fighting your way through 11 white shirts, sitting deep and prepared only to frustrate. Perhaps Villas-Boas thought that City would lose his legs. So Marseille needed to keep a clean sheet for more than 18 minutes. In the end, chasing, chasing without the ball, it was his team that seemed exhausted.
Villas-Boas can take pride in that, the diligence of his team. Yet it can hardly be called a fruitful strategy when such a negative approach still produces a 3-0 loss for a team without forwards. It is meetings like this that suggest that the Champions League needs a reform.
The problem is that most of the proposals involve setting up even more matches of this nature, but that’s an argument for another day.
Still, the best team won, the boring team lost, so it all ended happily. But it was a match that only partisan observers could love. City were pressing 70 percent possession for the most part, and while that statistic can be misleading at times, in this case it seemed to do Guardiola’s men a disservice.
A player position map, taken after 30 minutes, showed that City’s deepest outfield player was Aymeric Laporte, his average position being the midline. Each Marseille player occupied a middle place in their own field. It was a training exercise disguised as an elite competition. Sheffield United will give City more of a game on Saturday morning, don’t hesitate.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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