Judgment day for Manchester City
As City prepare to pass from one chapter in their remarkable recent history to another, the next week should go some way to determining how the squad will be judged.
|||London - As Manchester City prepare to pass from one chapter in their remarkable recent history to another, the next week should go some way to determining how the squad, and manager Manuel Pellegrini, will be judged.
In a year, under the stewardship of incoming coach Pep Guardiola, we can expect to see City look considerably different. Comments made by Yaya Toure’s rather excitable agent this week - suggesting the Ivorian will leave this summer - point towards the uncertainty that hangs over many of City’s players as they prepare to jettison one coach and welcome another.
So how do we judge what we may describe as the Manchester City Class of 2009-10-11?
A team driven by a spine of Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, Toure, David Silva and Sergio Aguero has not under-achieved. Two Barclays Premier League titles, two League Cups and one FA Cup is not a bad return since Abu Dhabi money began to flood City’s accounts in the early September of 2008.
Yet question marks remain. Last season’s title challenge was disappointing, this season’s even more so. And the biggest competition of all has always proved difficult.
City and the Champions League have looked ill at ease from the start. On the field, the team has struggled to make an impact. Off it, the supporters have viewed Europe’s Blue Riband tournament and its organisers, UEFA, with a mixture of suspicion and relative disinterest.
Which brings us to Wednesday’s appointment in Paris and next Tuesday’s second leg. If Pellegrini’s team progress past an opponent of real standing for the first time, his club could claim to have moved forwards significantly once again. If not, they will be open to accusations of stagnation and the great Champions League question will become Guardiola’s to answer.
The portents are not good for City ahead of the game at the Parc des Princes. Undoubtedly this is the biggest game of their season and they head into it without Kompany, without Toure and with goalkeeper Hart hurried back from a calf injury.
PSG are formidable at home, too, and not just in the context of France’s miserably uncompetitive top division. The recently anointed champions beat Chelsea 2-1 in the first leg of the last-16 tie and the English team were flattered by that score.
Laurent Blanc’s side - aware of suggestions from England that the uncompetitive French league hands them a free ticket to domestic glory - are highly motivated to improve on their record in a competition that really matters to them by making it to the last four for the first time in the modern era.
Blanc has told English football it has no right to a superiority complex as long as its teams struggle to make progress in Europe.
City forward Samir Nasri prefaced the tie at the weekend by suggesting PSG would struggle to cut it in the Barclays Premier League where the intensity and level of competition is so high. Former Manchester United defender Blanc was having none of it last night and said: ‘I’m a bit bored of this. How can you explain why England has a competitive domestic league but here in the last eight there is only one team? Maybe the Premier League is so intense that by March or April maybe they have reached their levels of fatigue.
‘We have to play in our league, we are happy to do so. We have to have a stronger league but you also need to find a balance. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see many English teams in the last four of the Champions League in the last five or six years. So there are problems in every domestic league, trust me.
‘We were happy to avoid playing the two ogres of European football, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. And you can maybe add a third one into that, Real Madrid. People have said this is an easy draw for us. I have the impression that people think it’s an easy draw. But I have seen so much of it that I gave the players a speech yesterday saying, ‘‘Don’t listen to them, do not believe it, they know nothing about football’’.
‘They have a great project there at City too, they have some great quality players on the pitch. They have great players in every line. They have a quality team with individual players who can make the difference. We’re preparing ourselves for two very difficult games.’
One would imagine City will need something approaching their best. As we saw with their 4-0 dismantling of Bournemouth in the Premier League at the weekend, Pellegrini’s team remain the best flat-track bullies in the English game. Against top dollar opposition, however, their recent efforts have been woeful.
Pellegrini is upbeat, at least, and promised: ‘We are not here to draw nil-nil. I think we have a good chance.’
Daily Mail