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Have been thinking of starting a thread on this for a while but thought it might be jumping the gun a bit before the team had chance to settle down a bit. There are some traits and weaknesses that are coming to show themselves a bit too regularly and although we have kind of gotten away with it mostly they need dealing with.

Starting slowly: Not always as sometimes we are on the ball and have had a clear chance within the first few minutes, but too often and possibly against certain teams we have a bit of bother with anyway, we come out half asleep, get the game taken away from us and then obviously struggle to get momentum. Anyone see any pattern in this?

Zonal marking: Has been covered in another thread so not much need to add to it, but our marking with the zonal system is worse than poor, this will be known about so i'm sure that they are working on it with some urgency.

Ending games with the jitters: This isn't in reaction to the Wolves game, ignore that one even and we still have gone into the final stages of games not putting the effort in to try and keep the ball.. it is like a collective shutdown that then translates into falling back surrendering initiative and giving the oppo the chance to organise a desperate push, which often results in arial attacks that make us even more scatty.

The first and the last of these three are all in the mind. but are worrying that they show the collective character of the team ad they need working on before they cost us dearly. At present we could play really well and yet still fucl up. The zonal thing is a practical problem but the other two aren't.. What should they do about it ? And are there any other glaring weaknesses that are not being dealt with?

Imo most of those things are quite easily explained down to lack of time spent playing together & particularly lack of winning trophies together. We've changed a lot of players & several managers whilst our competitors have been building or maintaining teams. I would expect us to get better & better in those areas, with the occasional blip, just by being together; provided Bob stays of course.

We lack genuine pace going forward now that Ballamy SWP etc are effectively gone. That's an option I would like us to have.

My usual standard criticism though is our delivery of the ball, both on the ground & in the air. People were suggesting not crossing was part of Bob's plan but he's clearly stated that Dzeko has partly been signed to get on the end of crosses, so crosses ARE in Bob's plan. Dzeko got no crosses he could have challenged for v Wolves. Not one.

How many times did Joe Hart have to scramble off his line to get a hand or finger tip to the ball amid ensuing danger? What about their keeper? We are the worst team in the Prem & possibly the whole country at delivering a non straight ball into the box; any kind of ball. Solve that & we win the league without any other improvements.

It is a really good point to compare what the keepers had to do on Sat, illustrates it perfectly. But then basically now we have a target man worthy of the name there is a good chance we will start to use that option, so you could say that problem is being addressed.
But your suggesting the starting and ending games will change with experience.. i hope you are right cos the way i see it is we can come out against Chelsea all guns blazing and tackling them off the park and then come out against others and be looking around as if they all thought they had turned up on the wrong day. Smacks of expectations to me, so they get caught out when they are not expecting the opposition to be at them so much. But seeing as they have proved they can get stuck in from the off, i'm failing to understand how too many times they dont.
Ending games seems a similar kind of problem too.

brite blu sky wrote:It is a really good point to compare what the keepers had to do on Sat, illustrates it perfectly. But then basically now we have a target man worthy of the name there is a good chance we will start to use that option, so you could say that problem is being addressed.
But your suggesting the starting and ending games will change with experience.. i hope you are right cos the way i see it is we can come out against Chelsea all guns blazing and tackling them off the park and then come out against others and be looking around as if they all thought they had turned up on the wrong day. Smacks of expectations to me, so they get caught out when they are not expecting the opposition to be at them so much. But seeing as they have proved they can get stuck in from the off, i'm failing to understand how too many times they dont.
Ending games seems a similar kind of problem too.

I think nowardays we start most games away from home really well though (apart from Leicester) & often score. It's been more a problem at home. At the end, I think some of our new players aren't fit enough yet & some of the more established ones aren't especially great athletes so the two things + a bit if nerves, add together.

I think the squad rotation that we operate is necessary but it increases the time necessary for our defenders to be a coherent defensive unit and it will take time for whichever four defenders we play to fit into the system without issues for the first 15 mins which we tend to see at the moment.
Further forward I think the arrival of Dzeko completes the options necessary to compete and as long as all the forward players are fit we have the skill and the options to defeat most teams.
I remain optomistic particularly for next season when I expect us to win something

Ted Hughes wrote:

brite blu sky wrote:It is a really good point to compare what the keepers had to do on Sat, illustrates it perfectly. But then basically now we have a target man worthy of the name there is a good chance we will start to use that option, so you could say that problem is being addressed.
But your suggesting the starting and ending games will change with experience.. i hope you are right cos the way i see it is we can come out against Chelsea all guns blazing and tackling them off the park and then come out against others and be looking around as if they all thought they had turned up on the wrong day. Smacks of expectations to me, so they get caught out when they are not expecting the opposition to be at them so much. But seeing as they have proved they can get stuck in from the off, i'm failing to understand how too many times they dont.
Ending games seems a similar kind of problem too.

I think nowardays we start most games away from home really well though (apart from Leicester) & often score. It's been more a problem at home. At the end, I think some of our new players aren't fit enough yet & some of the more established ones aren't especially great athletes so the two things + a bit if nerves, add together.

Well put it this way, and i'm not picking him out because i think he is the problem or anything, but on Sat Barry got robbed right at the start while he was trying to work out what he was doing, after which he woke up and played well. Yet v Chelsea Barry was one of the players that came straight out and did the robbing. Now what i that all about? bear in mind it is not Barry im really talking about here it is all of them.

The biggest weakness is our goalkeeper.

We need somebody lika Buffon ;-)

Very much agree that we are slow starters. Not so sure about the other two points though. I don't think the Zonal Marking system is the problem, just a lack of willingness by some players to attack the ball. As for ending games with the jitters, I think that's relatively common for all teams. It's always nervy when you're only a goal up.

Winning mentality ...... we still don't have it and that's why we still tend to do a Corporal Jones style "don't panic" at the end of games.

Other points made I'm in full agreement with - we absolutely must get some quality crosses in from the correct angle, without that and without outright pace we are predictable.

Surely finishing games weakly is very much down to fitness/stamina? Physical and mental fatigue?

As for starting slowly in games, I think we still really struggle sometimes to create a mentality that properly adresses how 'up for it' the opposition are when they play City. Sometimes it's like we have to get wound up by the oppo in order to dish it out. Not exactly a recent phenomenon, as our extensive list of being on the wrong end of an early cup exit illustrates.

Must be difficult to cultivate the same sort of drive to play Wolves than say Chelsea. Mancini should pin a photo of the league trophy above the dressing room door with 'Look but don't touch - it's up to YOU'. Written on it, in enough languages required for every to get it.

I agree that so many relatively new faces is also a factor as said up there^^ - it must be, as we have one of, if not the best squad in the league, and we're some way off winning it (months even!).

I've just realised we're also a bit rubbish in the middle part of games too. This thread can be disheartening.

ryanmcfc wrote:Very much agree that we are slow starters. Not so sure about the other two points though. I don't think the Zonal Marking system is the problem, just a lack of willingness by some players to attack the ball. As for ending games with the jitters, I think that's relatively common for all teams. It's always nervy when you're only a goal up.

If everyone starts to attack the ball doesn't it cease to be zonal marking?

You've got me Doug, I probably didn't phrase that correctly. Doesn't any marking system involve going after the ball when it comes near you though? As opposed to standing and watching.

ryanmcfc wrote:You've got me Doug, I probably didn't phrase that correctly. Doesn't any marking system involve going after the ball when it comes near you though? As opposed to standing and watching.

I wish I knew! It looks really crap when a ball goes over to nearly the back post and we have defenders more on the near post or just past it and all they do is turn and watch. It relies on either the keeper or THE man at the back post ( or closest to it) and on Saturday that was Zaba!

I really think that the opposition will have watched who takes up what position and simply miss out the best headers of the ball and attack the remaining space. Something like that anyway as we are looking pretty shaky. Every other team almost grabs hold of a shirt ,wrestles for a few minutes and gets away with it a la Vidic yesterday.

brite blu sky wrote:Have been thinking of starting a thread on this for a while but thought it might be jumping the gun a bit before the team had chance to settle down a bit. There are some traits and weaknesses that are coming to show themselves a bit too regularly and although we have kind of gotten away with it mostly they need dealing with.

Starting slowly: Not always as sometimes we are on the ball and have had a clear chance within the first few minutes, but too often and possibly against certain teams we have a bit of bother with anyway, we come out half asleep, get the game taken away from us and then obviously struggle to get momentum. Anyone see any pattern in this?

Zonal marking: Has been covered in another thread so not much need to add to it, but our marking with the zonal system is worse than poor, this will be known about so i'm sure that they are working on it with some urgency.

Ending games with the jitters: This isn't in reaction to the Wolves game, ignore that one even and we still have gone into the final stages of games not putting the effort in to try and keep the ball.. it is like a collective shutdown that then translates into falling back surrendering initiative and giving the oppo the chance to organise a desperate push, which often results in arial attacks that make us even more scatty.

The first and the last of these three are all in the mind. but are worrying that they show the collective character of the team ad they need working on before they cost us dearly. At present we could play really well and yet still fucl up. The zonal thing is a practical problem but the other two aren't.. What should they do about it ? And are there any other glaring weaknesses that are not being dealt with?

On reflection of all this on the back of the Villa game I'm now thinking that i had a point with what i was saying. Ok there were too many players not sparking on Sat but that aside the mentality was not right. Are we believing in our own ability too much? How can we come out against Chelsea fighting for every ball and putting maximum effort in and then come to Villa expecting to just pass it around them and into the net. We lost at Villa due to our psychology imo, we only started showing real urgency from about 75 mins onwards, WHY? At 0-0 Villa were trying to play football and if we had shown the same urgency at that time we would have been 2-0 up by half time.

I am now seeing this as a problem as a pattern is developing, it isn't good enough for Bob to just say there are no easy games in the Prem, He and perhaps more so Kiddo, need to tell the players in no uncertain terms that expecting to just outplay teams will not secure anything, we need to be going into these games with the idea we are going to lose unless we get stuck straight in.. we would almost be better starting the games at 0-1 down. We have seen this pattern develop, initially at home but particularly with teams like Stoke and Everton. Imo we have a problem with psychology and it needs sorting out. Ability is not in question our problems and weaknesses lie elsewhere.

We struggle to break down packed defences anyway, we don't have a good routine of feeding the strikers from wide. On Sat, Silva, our main creator down the middle, wasn't up to the standard he set before his injury. He struggled most of the time v Villa & also v Leicester apart from the one pass to AJ. He's not 100% match fit imo.

When the game started, I very much doubt we expected Vill a to have 11 men behind the ball & we didn't react quickly enough to it. Better teams than us have struggled in similar circumstances though, Villa were difficult to break down early on. Imo we didn't do that much wrong apart from gift them a goal. We were a bit slow 1st half but imo there were no real huge problems, just a bit of fine tuning.

The big thing we need is to start creating goals from wide positions. Everyone in the 'game' can see it. They've just been talking about it on the radio. Once we can do that regularly, we'll be as good as any side in the country, irrespective of any other organisational problems we need to address.

Weak-willed individuals, could that be the problem?

We always try to be too clever and score the perfect goal. We need to get the ball on to the wing, throw 7/8 bodies into the box and there's a good chance you'll score. Atm 7ft Dzeko is crossing it to 4ft Silva and Tevez.

Villa didn't start the game with 11 behind the ball.. they tried to come out. We were too slow in any build up, wide, central or whatever. We failed to take advantage of the space from the off before Villa got the goal. The build up play was so slow that it allowed Villa to get organised every time we went forward. We should have been showing the kind of urgency we did in the final 15 mins from the off. At 0-0 that would have paid off.

I've come to the conlusion that whoever criticises Zonal marking is basing their opinions by listening to the pundits instead of actually studying the two and coming to the actual conclusion that zonal marking is the easiest and most effective way of dealing with set pieces.

Andy Gray and Alan Hansen like to point out when a team has conceded from a set piece due to zonal marking which in their eyes is this modern foriegn shit because it happens every so often. If they were to individually analyse goals conceded from set pieces due to man marking they wouldn't have time to show the other matches.

The buzz word in Rugby league a few years ago was INTENSITY and the reasons given why the GB team seemed to fail against the Aussies was their abilty to play at a high intensity for the whole game, whereas we seemed to switch on and off during a game.

I see that happening with City. We have great ability but it needs switching on and often we just seem to switch it back off.

Sometimes our passing game seems to be slow and contrived. I think as we evolve, we will see it become more flowing and intuitive. We're still new and evolving at this.