This is a view that perhaps very few have thought about, I could be wrong.
The main differences between a home game and an away game are the crowd support, and home pride.
Which brings me to the term holistic and how it ultimately relates to away games.
"Holistic", by definition, and put simply in context of the squad, is placing much emphasis on being sensitive and responsive to the needs of a player, both professionally and psychologically, encouraging and making the squad feel 'good' about themselves.
The "holistic" approach has evidently worked at the Etihad, from the training ground, to the dressing room, to the Home Crowd support because the players have embraced holism.
However, they have come to rely on this approach Too Much.
Because, along come the away fixtures: Cardiff, Stoke and Villa. Crowd cheering diminishes, boo's increase.
A sizeable chunk of that ingrained holism automatically disappears, and we are left with a compromised squad performance.
This, together with our obvious defence issues, result in the poor away performances.
[I know we won 0-3 away to Plzeň, but it's because upped our game accordingly & we obviously placed much higher emphasis than ever before on at least making it at least past the CL group stage, and we were not up against such a fantastic side anyway].
I'm convinced that a workable BALANCE needs to be cemented between Pelle's holism and Mancini's more hardline, "do-or-else" approach.
And it needs to start NOW, with Pellegrini and the leadership team - believe me, I'm not shooting him down, in fact, I've praised his efforts previously, and I still do.
We need not go through managers if we have one who can find and perfect that balance.
THIS may be the only way for us to successfully challenge for the league title with the increased competition we have this season [bar scum ;)], and other trophies, even with the world-class stars that we have in our squad.
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