Manchester City’s loss to Lyon exposed some nagging problems and should be a wake-up call
The 2018-19 season has long been earmarked as Manchester City’s big push for the Champions League.
Pep Guardiola has had two years and three summer transfer windows to mould a squad capable of toppling the continent’s heavyweights and the manner of last term’s runaway Premier League triumph pointed to a team ready to challenge on all frontiers.
A feeling that this year’s competition could be particularly open – not least because the Zinedine Zidane-Cristiano Ronaldo axis has been shorn from Real Madrid – added to a sense of the planets aligning for City and the manager tasked with delivering the prize they covet most.
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Just one matchday into the Champions League, however, and that optimism has been punctured.
City lost their opening match of Group F on Wednesday night 2-1 at home to an unfancied Lyon team who are already eight points off the pace after just five rounds of the French top flight.
The club rated favourites by some bookmakers to lift the European Cup were two goals behind at half-time and a comeback hinted at by Bernardo Silva’s 67th-minute strike never materialised.
Of greater concern than an isolated defeat is what it may indicate for Guardiola’s men.
Remarkably, that was City’s fourth consecutive loss in the competition – an unwanted record for an English team – having also been beaten by Liverpool, twice, and Basel towards the end of the last campaign.
The sixth game is also the earliest in a season under Guardiola that they have lost. The Catalan went 11 fixtures unbeaten in his first term in charge in Manchester, while last year it was 22 matches.
Mitigating factors
City can point to a number of mitigating factors in their reverse to Lyon: namely, a tranche of significant absentees.
A long-term injury to Kevin De Bruyne continues to rob them of their beating heart, while record scorer Sergio Aguero was rested and left-back Benjamin Mendy was missed – both in attack and defence, where Fabian Delph’s rustiness teed up Maxwel Cornet’s opening goal.
The hosts were also without their mastermind, with Guardiola banished from the bench and consigned to the stands as punishment for his sending-off against Liverpool in April.
City boss Guardiola had to watch from the stands due to a ban (Source: Getty)
Laying the blame solely at those mitigating factors would be to ignore worrying signs that have peppered City’s first few matches of the season – and their over-reliance on Fernandinho.
A complacency and sloppiness that Lyon ruthlessly exploited had been visible in earlier fixtures against Newcastle, Wolves, Arsenal and Chelsea.
Has their dominance of last year bred a belief that they can roll over all comers, or is it another example of title winners taking time to rediscover the hunger? It may be neither, but sooner or later those bad habits were sure to catch up with them.
Fernandinho, meanwhile, looked unusually dozy as he was caught in possession for both of Lyon’s first-half goals, perhaps a consequence of being one of only two players to start all seven of City’s matches so far, including the Community Shield.
City targeted central midfield reinforcements in the shape of Fred and Jorginho, but the former joined Manchester United and the latter opted for Chelsea instead, leaving them short of cover for the Brazilian.
Bernardo Silva's goal made it 2-1 but proved a false dawn (Source: Getty)
Of course, this is just one defeat and nobody will be surprised if City still progress to the last 16 as Group F winners.
There is little harm in starting a Champions League campaign slowly, as Real Madrid can attest; the Spaniards didn’t top their groups yet went on to lift the trophy in each of the last two seasons.
But losing to Lyon felt less like a freak result and more like some of City’s festering issues being exposed. If Guardiola is to deliver on expectations and make this their season after all, this setback ought to serve as a wake-up call.