I thought Newcastle would probably get something off Manchester City on Saturday. I had lunch with a Newcastle fan on Thursday and told him as much. I spent the game watching City dominate without ever being convinced by them.
All the way through, I expected Newcastle to get something – until Kevin De Bruyne scored, at which I subtly adjusted my prediction to having felt City would find it difficult. Then Jonjo Shelvey swept in his equaliser and I was straight on the WhatsApp telling my mate that I’d told him so. Which is as a classic a case of confirmation bias as you’re likely to find.
But it also highlights the difficulty in assessing City at the moment. There feels something off about them. To the naked eye, or the gut, or whatever it is we use to assess football matches, they are not quite as slick, not quite as sharp, not quite as ruthless as they are at their best. Or do we just think that because they’ve lost this season to Norwich and to Wolves?
FT Newcastle 2-2 Man City
Is Pep Guardiola approaching the end of his three-year cycle? pic.twitter.com/d3qjrFdISv
— Football Eclipse (@FootballEclipse) November 30, 2019
They blew away Burnley on Tuesday; how far really were they from doing that to Newcastle? Given Understat’s xG model had them winning. 2.56-0.49 at Burnley and 2.44-0.21 at Newcastle, perhaps not very far at all. The xPTS table shows City seven points clear of Liverpool at the top, rather than 11 points behind.
xPTS, it should be said, is a far more volatile model than xG, which shows us that City have scored just 0.82 goals more than the algorithm expects and conceded 2.00 more. But still, that difference in xPTS is intriguing. Why are City’s results not matching up to the levels the model suggests their play is at?
It may simply be luck. Not everything in football is explicable. That’s really what xG models are there for, to strip away the noise, the fact that a strange bounce of a ball, a rare mistake, a moment of brilliance one way or the other, can in a low-scoring game such as football have a profound effect. The analysis is supposed also to pull down confirmation biases so that we don’t always reverse engineer explanations to fit the result.
And yet, and yet… anybody who has ever played sport at any level knows there are times when you feel inspired, when you’re desperate for the ball to come to you because you know you’ll do something good, and also days when something’s not quite there and you’d be happy enough to get away with basic competence, days when you accept and actively embrace pain and days when you just don’t fancy it and ease back a little. Whether that is a matter of confidence or motivation, whether it’s physical or mental, it exists. Or seems to exist which, in terms of the visualisation and self-belief urged by sports psychologists is perhaps the same thing.
This is Man City always believe and fight pic.twitter.com/GA1rfFCNGX
— Riyad Mahrez (@Mahrez22) December 3, 2019
In certain games this season City have not seemed quite so ruthless. In part that’s a simple matter of recruitment. Failing to replace Vincent Kompany in the summer was asking for trouble and it came with the injury to Aymeric Laporte. Suddenly John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi, neither habitually reliable, were left as the only two fit senior centre-backs, which has forced Fernandinho deeper, which in turn has increased the burden on Rodri in his first months in the league.
But perhaps there’s also an element of entropy. It’s something all managers, all teams have to face. After around three years, it seems, squads begin to weary of their manager and need refreshing. They get used to playing the same old way. Opponents work out ways to combat them. Newcastle knew that a 5-4-1 with two runners breaking quickly from midfield is a way both of frustrating City and causing them defensive problems. It’s not easy, but at least sides now have a basic idea.
Pep Guardiola is a very intense man. His fourth season at Barcelona went awry. Bayern players spoke of the relief after he’d left, the sense of relaxation at not being constantly nagged about their precise positions in training. It is part of his genius, but perhaps also a reason he should never stay anywhere too long. There’s been no cataclysmic collapse but City this season perhaps just lack a little sense of excitement, of new peaks being scaled, and as a result some of their snap has gone.
And that, maybe, is enough to turn a win into a draw or a draw into a defeat, the scale of each slip magnified by the remorselessness of Liverpool. Or perhaps that’s just confirmation bias, a way of explaining why City find themselves adrift.
