Steady start for Grealish but he may now drop to bench as part of City rotation
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By Sam Lee Oct 12, 2021 13
Jack Grealish’s standards are slipping. The numbers prove that since his eye-watering £100 million summer move to Manchester City there has been an alarming slump in his output.
Indeed, he is only the fourth most-fouled player in the Premier League so far this season. For somebody who has held topped the fouled charts for the past three seasons it will surely be a bitter disappointment.
No, of course not. Grealish has had a steady start to life at the Etihad Stadium, looking comfortable with his new tactical demands without setting the world alight just yet.
A fine goal against RB Leipzig, when he cut in from the left and fired into the far side of the goal with his right foot, is exactly the kind of thing that will be expected in the long run, although so far that is the stand-out moment.
If anything, a drop in the number of fouls won is a good thing, given City aren’t especially geared around set-pieces into the box and free kicks remotely near the halfway line are no good to them.
He has looked comfortable in the City line-up, which is not always easy so early on at the club, offering an outlet on the left and sometimes being used more so than other options. He struggled in the false 9 position at Anfield last Sunday — the first time he’s ever played the role.
The 26-year-old has said that his somewhat fortuitous goal against Norwich, which bounced off his shin as he arrived at the back post, was incredibly important to him because they are the type that he needs to be scoring in this City team, and that’s something he will inevitably have to improve on as his game changes to fit in at his new club.
But he need not change too much and in other respects he is still refreshingly Jack Grealish; he leads the Premier League for most carries, most progressive carries and furthest distance carried.
Given his vaunted ability to beat a man, he will have to start adding an end product when he gets towards the box, but that’s to be expected.
Whether it was Raheem Sterling, Bernardo Silva, Riyad Mahrez, Ferran Torres or Leroy Sane, not a single winger has truly thrived in their first season at City under Pep Guardiola. They need to learn their role, particularly in terms of positioning and movements, and Grealish is doing well on that front.
Yet as City reflect on their start to the season and look ahead to what comes next, it may be that Phil Foden comes back into the team on the left of the attack and Grealish is benched for a couple of games.
As the Premier League’s most expensive ever player, any kind of time on the sidelines would pique the interest of the wider footballing community, but in reality every City player’s place in the team is under threat because of how competitive the squad is.
He was always going to have to compete with both Foden and Sterling for a place on the left, and Ilkay Gundogan, Bernardo and Kevin De Bruyne in midfield, where he could eventually end up, retrained like Bernardo.
No matter what Guardiola decides, some top-quality players are going to be left out, and that caused a few problems at the end of last season with players looking to leave. That’s why he’s constantly rotating his team between the competitions and why his line-up for the Carabao Cup game against Wycombe contained five debutants in defensive positions but established internationals ahead of them.
City had injuries in defence at the time, otherwise John Stones, Nathan Ake and Oleksandr Zinchenko would have started. There were far more forwards available and in need of minutes, so Foden, De Bruyne, Sterling, Mahrez and Torres all got the nod.
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Grealish struggled in the false 9 against Liverpool at Anfield (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Sterling and Mahrez, far more so than Grealish, are interesting cases when it comes to their first-team minutes. Guardiola was always going to use them against Paris Saint-Germain last week, largely because they did not feature in his plans for the games at Chelsea and Liverpool.
At the end of last season, he had established a first-choice team for the big Champions League knock-out games, and a rotated XI for the matches in between. Sterling was in the latter, which was an interesting development in itself, but Mahrez had established himself on the right-hand side.
So far this season he has started just one of City’s seven Premier League games, the opener against Tottenham, and played in all three games in the Champions League and Carabao Cup.
Sterling is similar in that he has started one more Premier League match — as a striker against Southampton — but one fewer European game.
Gabriel Jesus staked his claim on the right-hand side by setting up three goals in his first two starts of the season, and with Guardiola wanting high pressing and/or extreme work-rate against Chelsea and Liverpool, the Brazilian was the obvious answer to keep his place.
As Guardiola said himself after the PSG game: “Maybe we were a bit less aggressive in our first actions (pressing) because of the quality of players that we have — Gabriel and Phil are more aggressive in terms of this than Raheem and Kevin.”
Of course, those players, and Mahrez, have other qualities that will be called upon throughout the season, it’s just that in recent games Guardiola has favoured a high-pressing, false-nine system similar to the one that got City through countless big games last season.
Those considerations account for so much of his selection. The rest is down to efforts in training and performance on match day.
“I try to rotate the team but at the same time I try to decide… for example now Aymeric Laporte, the game he played, he’s going to play the next game,” Guardiola explained after City’s 5-0 defeat of Norwich.
“The guys who played good today are going to play the next game. It is what it is.”
It’s simple, really, although it will be interesting to see if Laporte retains his place beyond the international break.
He started the season brilliantly and is probably City’s best passer of the ball, so he has kept his place in the team since that outing against Norwich, although he was caught out in Paris and Liverpool recently.
As he knows from last season, Stones will be ready to come back in if his performance drops. Stones, seemingly through no fault of his own, is now in the position Laporte was in last autumn. It’s a competitive business!
Despite this, there have still been questions asked among the fan base regarding Torres’ decreased involvement of late. In reality, after scoring twice against Arsenal at the end of August he has not looked as clinical, which is what Guardiola wants from his No 9 if he’s going down the more traditional route.
So when it came down to Sterling or Torres for the PSG game, and to come off the bench at Anfield, it seems to have been decided by efforts in training.
“Like Ferran, (Raheem) is so good making movements in behind, and in that game (PSG), the way he trained in the last weeks I thought he was able to do the good performance that he has done,” Guardiola said on Friday.
Maybe now Grealish will sit a few games out, as long as Foden comes back from England duty in good health. Having missed the start of the season, the academy graduate is just finding his feet in the side again but he was highly impressive against Chelsea and Liverpool and, quite simply, he knows his position inside out by now.
He had no choice: coming into the team as a teenager, Foden had to pick up all of Guardiola’s tactical demands so his natural ability could flourish. Grealish, meanwhile, has been in City training for seven weeks.
