If nouveau riche Manchester City stutter and stumble, Arsenal will keep their Champions League place.
But it’s too soon to know how consistent City might be over the next seven months
Last Monday night’s result was not wholly surprising : Aston Villa 1 Manchester City 1.
I was amazed that Mark Hughes left out Stephen Ireland, one of his core players.
He played Tevez because Argentina asked him not to. He wanted to avoid setting a precedent, a situation where Diego Maradona could ask City to leave Tevez out again, to help Argentina’s dodgy, nervous World Cup qualifying run-in.
Hughes played Adebayor because he scored in every game before suspension, and he played Bellamy because he is hot and scored while Ade was out.
Stephen Ireland is local, loyal, low-profile and would not kick up a stink if he was on the bench.
That compromise was one I could understand.
So City had De Jong, a fairly static anchorman, alongside Gareth Barry in midfield, with SWP wide right.
Richard Dunne put Villa 1-0 up after 15 with a header when he jumped above Barry, and after that the game did not suit Mark Hughes’s team selection. Villa were happy to defend their lead, letting City carry the game to them. Which they did without creating too much.
Against a Martin O’Neill team leading 1-0 at home, it’s hard to attack them and almost impossible to counter-attack them. And there’s always the possibility that Agbonlahor or Young will race away and make it 2-0.
Second half, Ireland came on and changed the game. He released Adebayor, who squared the ball for Bellamy to make it 1-1, which was a fair result.
If you have four strikers, you have firepower. Hughes has Roque Santa Cruz, Adebayor, Tevez and Bellamy and he can make them compete for a place in the team, but he has to keep everyone happy and that is never easy.
Does four strikers work? Well, it worked in 1999, when Andy Cole, Dwight Yorke, Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer won a legendary treble with Manchester United.
Spurs now have Crouch, Defoe, Keane and Pavlyuchenko, with the latter said to be “injured”. Maybe he is.
In general, managers walk a fine line between having too many players and too few. Wenger has always preferred to have too few.
In the past, when City played 4-5-1, Ireland and SWP and Robinho exploded through midfield at high speed, joining the striker, and finding each other with passes played at pace, often first time.
But if City play three strikers, and Aston Villa keep four or five back to cover those three, Stephen Ireland’s natural game is nullified. And that’s partly why Hughes didn’t play him. The City team is changing and the way it’s changing doesn’t allow this particular local hero to do what he does best. The more strikers are ahead of Ireland when City win the ball back, the less dangerous he’s gonna be, I think. He can break fast with the ball and break fast to support the ball, but he does not suit a 4-3-3 system.
Man City have murdered Arsenal on the break two years running, most recently when they won 4-2 on September 12, doing to them what the Gunners used to do to many opponents during the Bergkamp-Henry-Ljungberg years.
In a few months from now, Mark Hughes might find his strongest team and stick with it, as he mostly did with Wales and Blackburn. When he does that, his side might work their way into a winning position and then have the nous to hang on to three points, which they’ve often failed to do in the past year. If Robinho or SWP don’t get into his side, tough. Micah Richards was on the bench at Villa and he may not be in the side either.
Still, it’s early days with only eight games played and 30 to go. It’s October and the season is in its third month but international breaks have interrupted the campaign too often to give us a real sense of how the 2009-2010 season might develop.
We don’t know whether Arsenal and Man City are competing for fourth place. This season might be a week-by-week contest between Chelsea and Manchester United for the title, between Arsenal and Liverpool for third place, or between Arsenal and Liverpool for fourth place, or none of the above.
Up till now I’ve been viewing Arsenal v Man City as a sub-plot within the season, a scrap between a French experimental scientist who is trying to grow a team and a Welsh pragmatist who is trying to collage one by throwing players together to make something vivid and effective.
Right now, Thomas Vermaelen looks a far better centreback than Toure or Lescott. Both teams will suffer injuries, both can bring back match-winning talents like Nasri and Petrov, and both might sign new faces in January.
For the next few weeks and months London’s biggest club and Manchester’s second biggest will each be trying to open up a gap above the other, near the top of the table. Arsenal v Birmingham is on Saturday, October 17, and that’s a home banker. So Man City have no room for a slip up at Wigan on the Sunday.