Manchester City 4-1 Arsenal and that might well be it for Mikel Arteta's title challenge. But for Pep Guardiola, the secret to this monumental win was actually tearing up the playbook, rather than sticking to it...
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00:00 Following their crushing defeat at the Etihad, Arsenal's eight-point lead at the top of
00:07 the Premier League has now been cut to two, and were City to win both of their games in
00:12 hand, they would actually trail them by four.
00:14 Full disclosure, I genuinely thought Arsenal were going to do something last night, and
00:18 then...
00:19 Hello everybody, Adam Cleary, 442 here, and is it all over, the title race in the Premier
00:32 League?
00:33 Well, no, no it's not, that's not how maths works, but also, it might be.
00:38 Now, come here, if I said, and I can't believe I'm going to say this, but if I said it was
00:43 by going 442 and playing really long, basically Mike Bassett-ing the situation, would you
00:50 believe me?
00:51 Because it was.
00:52 Right, so quick as a bee, I'm just going to go over how Arsenal and Man City normally
00:58 set up, because you need to understand what it is they normally do to understand what
01:01 they didn't do, like, just come here.
01:02 So Manchester City normally come out in a 4-3-3, except it's not a 4-3-3, because what
01:06 they want to do is end up with a box midfield and a front five.
01:09 So, the way they go about that normally is Gundogan and De Bruyne, they push right up,
01:13 Rodry's normally in the middle, he goes out to that side, and it has been John Stones,
01:16 but they've messed around with it, he comes across from right back, inverts it in the
01:20 middle and the back four shuffle into a back three.
01:23 Voila, 3-2-5, box midfield.
01:25 Now, Arsenal, they are nominally listed as a 4-2-3-1, but they want to do the exact same
01:30 thing.
01:31 And the way they do that is they've already got Martinelli, Odegaard and Saka pushed right
01:34 up, so they leave a little bit of room, Xhaka comes into the advance space, Sienkiewicz
01:38 inverts into there, and voila, once the defence comes across, 3-2-5, with a box midfield.
01:43 Now, even though Arsenal have been off the pace in recent weeks, these are still undeniably
01:47 the two best teams in the league for playing this exact system, so it was going to be really
01:51 fascinating to see what happened when they just went equally up against each other like
01:55 that.
01:56 Who would give?
01:57 But curiously, what gave was Pep Guardiola, and what he gave was not one single f***.
02:02 City, after playing it almost exclusively since the World Cup and in their most important
02:06 game of the season so far, just binned off their entire approach.
02:10 They just went with a flat 4 at the back, and not even one with overlapping full backs
02:14 or anything exciting like that, they just put all four of them in a nice big row, I'll
02:18 have to move the magazine for this, and then just sat them, really deep, really unadventurous.
02:22 Bernardo Silva played all the way out wide, really stuck to his side over there, and De
02:26 Bruyne just kind of floated around Haaland as if he was a little man centre-forward playing
02:30 with a big man target player.
02:32 You know, like the good old days.
02:34 And the reason they did this, right, is because, and Roberto de Zerbi sort of pioneered this
02:38 at Brighton this season, okay, it's all well and good working out how you will beat a team's
02:43 press, knowing how they're going to come at you, and coming up with ways you can get around
02:47 that.
02:48 But what Pep wanted to do here, and what for the first 30 minutes of this football game
02:51 he did absolutely unbelievably well, was he didn't beat the press, he controlled the press.
02:56 Put players in positions and situations where they wouldn't normally be to force Arsenal
03:01 to press in a way they wouldn't normally do to exploit the hole that would lead.
03:05 It's like genuine 4D chess stuff, this.
03:08 So this is how Arsenal build up, yes, but it isn't how they press, I'm just going to
03:11 wave my magic wand here.
03:12 Now when they normally press, and especially how they thought they'd be pressing in this
03:15 game, they're up against three defenders, so Jesus, Saka and Martinelli, they can all
03:19 take a man each, close down where they need to, move the ball around, just how it normally
03:23 works.
03:24 But here, there was four, and because the two wide ones weren't even pushing on, that
03:27 forced them to split themselves massively across that front line.
03:31 Now a press is all about squeezing the right areas at the right time, so if you've actually
03:34 got a man disadvantage and you spread out across the entire width of the pitch, it's
03:37 impossible to do.
03:38 And whatever side of the pitch they were on, one of those centre midfielders, whether it
03:41 was Rodri or Gundogan, they would come in to make a little triangle in these areas of
03:46 the pitch.
03:47 Now because Man City's wide attackers weren't coming back to get involved with this, they
03:49 were staying really high, that meant the full backs, Ben White and Zinchenko, had a real
03:53 problem of getting involved with that.
03:55 They couldn't really push up to join in, because one or two passes and they're in.
03:58 So that meant that all three of Arsenal's midfielders had to push up into these areas
04:02 to try and help with the press, because City were just knocking it around for fun.
04:05 And as you can see, what does that leave?
04:07 An enormous amount of space in this area, so what City were doing was using these little
04:11 triangles and getting it to one of the centre backs, who would then launch it long into
04:15 this area here.
04:16 It's a 4-4-2 with a long ball.
04:21 And that meant that De Bruyne could drop a little deeper, the defender doesn't want to
04:23 go with him because you don't want to leave Haaland one-on-one.
04:26 He gets time, he gets space, he can put in Grealish, he can put in Gundogan, he can work
04:29 with Haaland, he can do whatever he wants.
04:31 Or, as we're about to see for the goal, Haaland can even drop deep, because the defender will
04:34 go with him, leaving De Bruyne one-on-one, he can play the ball through and De Bruyne
04:39 is in.
04:40 City are very happy, they're knocking it around, they're playing at the back, they've got one
04:42 of these little triangles on the go, they're just waiting for Arsenal to push up sufficiently
04:46 and then bang, the long ball goes into Haaland, he has got holding beat for days, receives
04:51 the ball, brings it down, plays in Kevin De Bruyne, he runs through, 1-0 Manchester City.
04:56 And this happened a couple of times in the first half, either it was Haaland dropping
04:59 off or De Bruyne and they linked up with each other.
05:01 City should have been 3 or 4-0 up in the first half off this ploy alone.
05:05 And that's not a criticism of Arsenal, by the way, they would have worked on playing
05:08 against a very specific system all weekend training, turned up and it just wasn't there.
05:13 They looked all at sea and confused and disorganised because they would have been, they would have
05:17 been scrambling to find solutions to this on the pitch and it took them about half an
05:21 hour to come up with any.
05:22 In the end, they moved Martinelli all the way back to sort of keep an eye on Bernardo
05:25 Silva, that sort of allowed Tshchenko to move over so they had a little extra man here and
05:29 they sat a little deeper and it did help, but by that point it was 1-0, City were absolutely
05:33 flying and when they got the set-piece goal, again, Hewless ball, that was it, game over.
05:38 Now look, everybody's talking about what a genius ploy this was from Pep and just when
05:43 they think they've got the answers, he changes the questions, but I just want to offer a
05:48 small defence of Arsenal here.
05:51 To me, they looked absolutely shattered.
05:54 I talked in a recent video, which should be appearing on screen right about now, how their
05:58 problems with defending in the last couple of games have largely come from, yes, Saliba's
06:01 missing and they've got Holding instead and that has a knock-on effect around the team,
06:04 but also they're making so many little mistakes and they're doing so many things wrong that
06:09 they weren't previously and I genuinely think the reason for that, it's not a witch has
06:13 cast a spell on them, I think they're just really physically and mentally tired.
06:17 I think what illustrated this so well last night was how Kevin De Bruyne looked like
06:21 he just had three weeks off in the Bahamas and came back and he was running circles around
06:25 everyone whereas Saka and Odegaard, the two players who make everything happen in an attacking
06:29 sense for Arsenal, just looked leggy and second to every ball and they were misplacing passes.
06:34 Like this City goal here, Odegaard just doesn't really think and the pass is so half-hearted,
06:40 it's just so unlike how he's been this season.
06:42 So, yep, nerd, around the numbers, over the course of this entire season, Kevin De Bruyne
06:47 has played over 600 minutes less than Martin Odegaard and nearly 1,000 minutes less than
06:54 Bakayo Saka.
06:55 Even just counting from the end of the World Cup, that's 300 minutes less than Odegaard
06:59 and nearly 400 minutes less than Saka.
07:01 And that really did jump out at me as quite surprising because City have been in everything
07:05 this season.
07:06 They've got to the quarter-finals of the League Cup, they're still in the semi-finals of the
07:08 Champions League, they've been second best to Arsenal in the Prem, so they've not really
07:12 been able to take their foot off the gas, they've been chasing them down all season
07:15 and they're in the final of the FA Cup.
07:17 It's almost impossible for them to have played more games this season.
07:20 And yet De Bruyne, arguably their most important player in terms of how the whole team functions,
07:25 has missed quite a lot of that.
07:26 In fact, of the 26 games he's been available since the World Cup, he's only completed 90
07:31 minutes in eight of those and didn't start seven.
07:34 And I know that might just sound like, "Oh, classic Pep, he likes to rotate, he likes
07:37 to tinker," but if you just snip out the Sheffield United game, where they were playing lower
07:41 league opposition, and no disrespect, but it's one you can rotate for, he's actually
07:45 started all of the last eight, their most important run of the season, he hasn't missed
07:50 any of it.
07:51 And I think that might be the cleverest thing Pep has done this season, not this genius
07:54 tactical tweak, but just sparing the legs of his best players in the early months of
07:59 the season so that in the second half, after the World Cup, they would genuinely look levels
08:04 and levels above their nearest competition.
08:06 And so they didn't look tired at all last night, they looked fresh, they looked hungry,
08:09 they looked like they were going to win every single game they play, whereas Arsenal, a
08:12 team who don't have the squad depth or the luxury to be able to make those kind of changes,
08:17 just looked knackered.
08:18 So my defence of Arsenal is that this isn't really their fault, it's not that they got
08:22 found out or they can't play at this level or they can't hang with a team like City,
08:26 of course they can, they're the best team in the league all season, it's just that they
08:29 got done by a tactical mastermind for 30 minutes and seasons are just so long, man, so long
08:35 and so hard.
08:36 But that being said, as the saying goes, my friends, it is not over until the bald Spanish
08:42 man wins.
08:44 So let us know what you think is going to happen in the title race in the comments below
08:46 and of course don't forget, like, share, subscribe, you know the drill, there's a button, you
08:50 click it and you get to see all the fun videos, all of them.
08:52 In the meantime though, genuinely thank you so much for watching, I thought that game
08:55 was great and I've had a lovely time talking about it, so thank you for watching this and
08:59 letting me do that for a job.
09:00 I've been Adam Cleary, this has been 442 and I'll see you soon, bye!