When Erling Haaland got injured, the big question around Manchester City was simple: how would Pep Guardiola replace their biggest goal threat by far?
There were two main ideas. The first and most obvious was that Omar Marmoush would replace Haaland almost like-for-like. The Egyptian can make runs in behind opposition defences and had, at that point, scored five league goals since he signed in January.
The other idea was that Guardiola would fall back on the tried and tested false nine method, and there were plenty of candidates for that: Ilkay Gundogan, Phil Foden and Jack Grealish among them. Guardiola also cited James McAtee and Oscar Bobb.
Fast forward seven matches and City have scored 14 goals, with 11 different players on the scoresheet. In Haaland’s nine games before getting injured, City only had six different scorers.
Haaland was on the bench for the 1-0 victory against Wolves on Friday night, which raises another interesting question: how will they fit him into a team with newfound stability, in their best form of the season by miles?
When City faced Nottingham Forest at Wembley on Sunday, they used a 4-2-2-2 system that did not contain any strikers — not even false nines! — and could be considered to include six midfielders. At the same time, those players provided wing play, runs in behind and everything else you would need to control the middle of the pitch and provide a goal threat.
In that game at Wembley, Grealish and Lewis were the middle ‘2’ in the 4-2-2-2, while Marmoush and Savinho were the front ‘2’. Because of City’s high full-backs, ‘wingers’ Marmoush and Savinho played inside, in more like attacking midfield roles. The only complication when explaining that is that because Grealish and Lewis were nothing like strikers, they could also be termed attacking midfielders, just even more central and deeper than the inside wingers.
They were not exactly holding midfielders, though, because that is what Bernardo Silva and Mateo Kovacic were.
So City essentially had three stacks of two — Bernardo and Kovacic at the bottom with Grealish and Lewis in front of them, forming a square or box. Marmoush generally offered runs in behind, which Savinho also did, along with dropping deeper into midfield.
This felt like a culmination of different ideas that had slowly come together throughout the previous six games, with different bits being taken from each and all thrown together at Wembley. Inevitably, it was not a culmination at all: on Friday night against Wolves, Guardiola tweaked it again, using a winger on the wing for the first time in a month.
“For nine years, I’ve always played with wingers high and wide, one against one, but lately for different reasons, for stability, maybe we need more control or whatever, we play with the full-backs wide, that’s why he’s playing less, but not because he’s playing bad,” Guardiola said of Doku after he had helped City beat Everton and Aston Villa from the bench.
Doku’s start against Wolves prompted a change: O’Reilly was asked to underlap, rather than provide the width.
This was actually a main feature of the game, until Wolves doubled up on Doku for the second half: before the break, the Belgian was always free to receive the ball wide and in space on the left, meaning Wolves full-back Nelson Semedo had to rush out to him. That was the prompt for O’Reilly to drift into the space Semedo had left, and City looked to exploit this a lot.
Overall, it was not a vintage performance by any means from City; relatively stable after some early Wolves chances, but still extremely sloppy and fairly nervy. Still, it is another victory on the board, and another one for this new system. A team that only won 11 of 31 matches from October to March has now won six of their last seven.
This will have to be considered Guardiola’s solution to his team’s ills this season — they now have that much-coveted stability and a solid defence — but he did not come up with it overnight: it has almost developed linearly game after game, and the spark for it happened by chance.
That spark, for all the different roles in midfield, actually came in defence. During the FA Cup quarter-final at Bournemouth, Guardiola took off centre-back Abdukodir Khusanov at half-time and replaced him with nominal left-back Nico O’Reilly, moving Josko Gvardiol to the middle.
“One of the reasons was that Khusanov had a yellow card, and I didn’t want to take a risk, and we wanted to push a little bit more from the left.
“In that moment, I didn’t think Nico [O’Reilly] was going to play the minutes he’s going to play, and Josko [Gvardiol] comes into the middle…”
Guardiola has stuck with the back four that finished that match — Nunes, Ruben Dias, Gvardiol and O’Reilly — for five out of the six games since. In that time, they have conceded just three goals and only been behind for 24 minutes.
Haaland on the bench against Wolves (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
“In the back-four now we are stable,” Guardiola said a week ago. “We have pace with Josko, Mateus and Nico because they are so fast, and the intelligence and leadership and unbelievable leadership from Ruben.”
Using Nunes and O’Reilly as high and wide full-back means that everybody else can tuck into the middle, but that was not how things started out even just a few games ago.
Against Leicester City, for example, the game directly after Bournemouth, Nunes and O’Reilly stayed deeper and narrower than they have been of late, generally making underlapping runs if they did get forward. Guardiola used a front four in Haaland’s first game out injured, but he used actual wingers — Jeremy Doku and Savinho — as the wide men. That said, Savinho often tucked inside, and the right wing was then left empty.
There were two players in the middle of the front four, and it was a partnership that suggested we might get both of the most obvious Haaland replacement options: Marmoush made runs behind and Grealish acted more as a false nine. Behind them were Gundogan and Nico Gonzalez.
The following game, the Manchester derby at Old Trafford, O’Reilly pushed up high on the left and there was an occasional experiment with Nunes pushing up on the right, but Bernardo often covered for him in the exact space you would expect a right-back to be. Phil Foden and Marmoush would have been the ‘wingers’ but, like at Wembley, they were pushed inside.
De Bruyne and Gundogan were the ‘2’ behind them, but with Bernardo doing all sorts — dropping back to right-back, popping up between the lines or playing as the winger himself — there was not the same constant two-man base in midfield as in other games.
The only game when there was a change in the back four was against Crystal Palace, where Lewis came in at right-back. He generally stayed deep and narrow to help the midfield, meaning the right wing was again empty when the ball was on the other side.
Essentially, the only difference to the Forest line-up was that Lewis was asked to stay deeper. Everything else — O’Reilly high and wide, the wingers tucked in, the midfield box — was all there.
Away from home against Everton, City went back to full-backs going into narrow midfield positions in possession, but when they played Aston Villa three days later, they turned up with the 4-2-2-2 in what seems — right now at least — to be its final, polished form.
Haaland is nearing a return to the City line-up, and while that is almost certainly good news for the team, it is interesting that Guardiola has discovered this stability without the Norwegian.
It is important not to rule out a complete change from Guardiola when Haaland is back, but if he wants to retain the approach that has delivered such good results over the past month, perhaps something like the set-up against Villa might accommodate the No.9.
That was the night when Marmoush started centrally and made runs behind, rather than start on the left and being pushed inside by the high full-back. If Haaland takes that central role, City may be able to replicate their current tactics.
If Guardiola did not want both of his wingers to offer runs in behind as well as Haaland, he could use Grealish on the left instead of Marmoush, as more of a steadying presence, or McAtee or Foden instead of Savinho on the right.
That way, they still have one player (Haaland) who will stay high and make the dynamic runs behind, as well as the option for Marmoush and/or Savinho to offer a similar attacking threat, or the more link-up focused approach of Grealish/Foden/McAtee.
Haaland’s partner (Gundogan or De Bruyne) can link up with one of the more possession-focused ‘wingers’, ahead of a two-man deep-lying midfield made up of two from Bernardo, Kovacic and Nico Gonzalez.
That is a lot of words for something that will probably be irrelevant when Guardiola does something entirely different when Haaland is available again, but it must present a bit of a head scratcher given the goals have flowed without their main man.
(Top photo: Carl Recine/Getty Images)