put this up because the first pic may please Mase
Manchester City have had more crucial, eye-catching and emphatic wins over United – but never one this easy
Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden celebrate for Manchester City against Manchester United
By Jack Pitt-Brooke Nov 7, 2021 96 The 6-1 victory here at Old Trafford, 10 years and two weeks ago, will always have a place in Manchester City folklore. But in terms of dominance and control and the assertion of superiority, that game had nothing on Saturday.
City have come across town and won plenty of times since that win that changed everything. This was City’s eighth victory here since then and sixth under Pep Guardiola but, even as the idea for City of winning at United becomes more familiar, there was a unique quality to this one.
There have been more eye-catching wins, like the 3-0 in March 2014, on the way to Manuel Pellegrini’s title. There have been more important wins, like the 2-1 in December 2017 that opened up the gap between Guardiola’s side and Jose Mourinho’s United. There have been tenser wins, like the 2-0 win here in April 2019, as City tried to hold off Liverpool’s title challenge. And there have been moments, like in the Carabao Cup win here in January 2020, when City looked like taking United apart, only to be pegged back.
But there has never been anything like this.
Forget the various scorelines over the years, this was City’s easiest ever win at Old Trafford. The 2-0 final score does almost nothing to tell the story of this imbalanced game. As a spectacle, it was impressive to see City play so well. As a derby, this never got going. As a competitive football match, it was a non-event.
What was so striking from the outset was that United could not offer City the slightest bit of resistance. From the start, City played their normal assertive structured game, dominating the ball, making the pitch big when they had it and compact when they did not.
Everyone knows how City play by now. This is Guardiola’s sixth season at the club and over that time the players have mastered his complex approach to the game, the positions they have to take in possession, the organised build-up from the back, the movements off the ball, the co-ordinated press when they lose it.
City are very good at what they do but they are not unbeatable. They lost to Crystal Palace, at home, only last week. They were knocked out of the Carabao Cup by West Ham United three days before that. In August, they lost to Nuno Espirito Santo’s short-lived Tottenham Hotspur.
But what those teams all had in common was a plan, an idea for how to counteract City’s strengths and try to probe their weaknesses. What was so damning about United yesterday was they posed City no questions and caused them no problems.
Three times under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in the league they have beaten City, always with pace in behind to kill them on the break. But there was none of that on this occasion. Not with Cristiano Ronaldo and Mason Greenwood up front in the 5-3-2 in the first half, and not when Jadon Sancho came on and United went to 4-2-3-1 in the second half. United’s only shot on target all day — from Ronaldo in the first half — came from a Luke Shaw cross.
You might expect a team with three centre-backs and Shaw wide on the left to use the England left-back’s energy to get forward but, in truth, that was his only serious venture into City territory in the first half. For most of that time, Shaw and Aaron Wan-Bissaka on the opposite side were effectively pinned back by City, giving United no width, no outlet, no pace and absolutely no threat.
(Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
And yet even despite that, you might expect a team with a back five and two holding midfielders in front of them to be difficult to play against, keeping space at a minimum, forcing the opposition to work hard for their chances. But it was just so bizarrely easy for City to move United around and open them up. From Joao Cancelo’s cross from the left forcing the early own goal, to Phil Foden’s run in behind that should have made another for Gabriel Jesus or Kevin De Bruyne, to the saves David de Gea had to make from Cancelo or De Bruyne soon after that.
The dominant image of the afternoon was City simply passing the ball around static red shirts, unopposed, as if this was a coaching seminar put on by Guardiola to demonstrate the principles of the positional game. United’s players were reduced to the role of passive mannequins.
Even worse for United was the second goal, just before the break.
City put together a 25-pass move, United unable to lay a finger on them, and unable to do anything to step Cancelo from swinging in a cross to the far post. You can blame Shaw for switching off and not stopping Bernardo Silva from scoring, but so much had gone wrong before then too.
Perhaps the most damning part of all was the second half.
This should have been the start of a fightback — we have seen plenty of them from United recently — and yet even with Sancho thrown on and a new formation, they could not conjure one single proper attack. They finished the game having had only four touches in City’s box, their fewest in a Premier League game since Opta began recording that data in 2008; their previous lowest in the Premier League this season, when they lost 4-2 at Leicester City, was 19.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that almost nothing happened after half-time, before a late flurry of chances for a third City goal, all of which were missed.
Again, it felt like a training session, this one designed to prove the power of resting in possession, defending by keeping the ball, not even having to rely on substitutes to kill a game but simply leaning on your own superiority. City, in the end, completed more second-half passes than United did in the whole game. Guardiola joked afterwards that City had just “kept the ball in the fridge”.
Nothing that you would normally expect from a derby game was on show here. No competitive tension, no suspense, no drama, no nerves. This used to be one of the great occasions of English football, and when United are causing City problems it still can be. But yesterday it was not.
Seeing such an obvious gulf between the two teams does at least prompt the question of why things should be so different this time. Of course, City have spent a lot of money on their team, but so have United. Yes, Guardiola has been at City for more than five years but Solskjaer has been at United for almost three, enough time for most managers to instill their ideas. But in that time, what, if anything, has been instilled? These two teams are — on the evidence of yesterday — getting even further apart.
Perhaps the difference between the two teams’ attitudes to their star players is instructive. This summer City spent £100 million on Jack Grealish but he was an unused substitute today, Guardiola preferring Foden wide on the left, with Bernardo and De Bruyne as a pair of false nines. Given how City toyed with the United defence, moving it around and picking it apart, it was hard to disagree with his decision.
Meanwhile this summer, United re-signed Ronaldo, forcing a change in style from the approach that had delivered some success for Solskjaer before then. United are no longer the team who have destroyed City on the break in the past. They have to play a slower, more methodical game, more focused on one thing in particular: getting the ball to their most famous player.
In some senses, it has worked. Ronaldo has four Premier League goals and another five in the Champions League. He had United’s only chance here and on another day, if he had scored from it, the momentum of the game might have changed.
But Ronaldo did not score, and United did not have another serious attack all game.
This is a very different United team now from the one that has beaten City even in the recent past.
It used to be that City winning at Old Trafford would feel so unlikely and so difficult as to be somehow transgressive. But they have never won easier here than today.
by gmercer1 » Sun Nov 07, 2021 11:44 am 
