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!
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