EVERTHING is a work in progress. Manchester City began this season by conceding six goals in their opening two games and the defensive reset that Pep Guardiola was intent on looked to some like it had failed. But in football nothing has ever failed or succeeded, it’s just somewhere, improving or declining on a huge, endless graph. And if the 5-2 reverse to Leicester City in matchweek two suggested the decline sighted last season was here to stay, what has happened since has catapulted City not only into the heart of the title race but has made them favourites to add a third Premier League win in four seasons. Five clean sheets in their last six games and 10 overall is more than any other Premier League team has recorded this season. In the old days a team won the title with a tight defence, scoring goals at the other end was just icing the cake. Are City and Guardiola going old school?
City can go top of the league overnight if they win away at West Brom on Tuesday evening. They face a club who have reached for the reliable own brand pain relief option of Sam Allardyce to try and avoid relegation and it has been a mixed bag so far. Four points have been gleaned from trips to Anfield and the hated Molineux but at home West Brom have lost 3-0, 5-0 and 4-0 under Allardyce, so the visit of Manchester City promises to exacerbate that trend. Big Sam was touted by some as a potential “defensive advisor” to Guardiola earlier in the season. You have to say that the signs are that City’s manager has managed to work things out for himself. The Baggies have let in 14 under Allardyce, one more than City have all season. Maybe, Usual Suspects style, Pep was the defensive advisor all along.
The raw facts on City’s defence are these: six goals conceded in the first two games, just seven more in the subsequent 16 matches. What changed? Well Ruben Dias came made his debut in the third game of the season so one working theory is that he could have made a *massive difference*. If Dias hadn’t kindly been given some rest by his manager in the 5-0 win against Burnley (Guardiola substituted him on 70 minutes), he would have recorded 10 clean sheets in his opening 16 games. As it is, he has nine (because the rules are you need to play in the whole game to get the clean sheet, and rightly so). Even nine is impressive, though.
As the graphic below reveals, only five outfield players in Premier League history have had more in their opening 16 games and there are caveats galore. For instance, it’s questionable how much Mike Newell offered defensively to Blackburn Rovers, and while Paul Davis was an excellent all-round midfielder at Arsenal, his first 16 Premier League games were in no way his first 16 league games for the club, as his career spanned the great reconstitution of 1992. That leaves Juliano Belletti and Paulo Ferreira at Chelsea, players who operated in slightly different eras but at a club for whom a mean defence was always a priority, and Gabriel Heinze, someone who joined Manchester United in 2004, a moment when the club were rebuilding their attack but had a very serviceable defence.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Ruben Dias has made one of the best defensive starts the Premier League has seen and has every chance of progressing further. For more than a decade Manchester City have been spending heavily on defenders to try and find one who would have an impact on the club like Nemanja Vidic did at Manchester United or Virgil van Dijk has done at Liverpool. Apropos of something, the record for clean sheets in a single Premier League season by an outfield player (or indeed any player) is 25 by Frank Lampard in 2004-05. City have 20 games left so it’s unlikely Dias can challenge that this season but, then again, it’s not impossible.
It’s not impossible because City’s underlying defensive numbers have all snapped back into place. 2.4 shots on target conceded per game is around what the team were doing in 2017-18, the club’s best league campaign under Guardiola. Their xG conceded per game is running at 0.78 at the moment which is not quite as good as 0.63 in 2017-18 (the best figure ever recorded in the Premier League xG era) but much better than last season’s figure of 0.99, which rates only 23rd overall. It was that drop-off that made City’s title defence so limp last season, and it’s the Dias-led recovery, in association with the Complete Redemption of John Stones that means that the club go to the Hawthorns with top spot in their sights. If they win, they’ll be the ninth different team to top the Premier League overnight this season, a record, but sooner or later the musical chairs will stop, and who would bet against City being the team who manage to build a significant advantage as the second half of the season unfolds.
