CITY Blues will look at Bravo big picture
WHEN Omar Berrada, City’s chief operating officer, and the rest of the Blues’ hierarchy consider transfer targets, it is always with at least one eye on the long-term health of the club.
Take the signing of Aymeric Laporte last January, for example.
City were still challenging on four fronts when injuries began to take their toll on Pep Guardiola’s side.
Vincent Kompany had already missed 22 games with a spate of problems and John Stones had been out of the side for six weeks with a hamstring injury.
It was a short-term issue but Berrada knew that there was a long-term requirement to reinforce Pep Guardiola’s defensive line with a young, strong, ball-playing centre-half.
Laporte fitted the bill and City broke their transfer record with a £57m move.
“In whatever planning we do for the squad, we have a three, four, five-year vision of what we want the squad to look like,” Berrada said of deal in Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing documentary.
“What we decided to do is to bring that investment forward to the winter transfer window. We’d seen that, unfortunately, Vincent Kompany had more injuries than we would have liked. We decided to go for a high quality player in that position.”
It was not an ideal scenario for City, considering £130m had been spent on three full-backs in the previous window, but it is evidence of the reactive strand of the club’s policy when it comes to crisis management.
The Blues now face a similar puzzle in the wake of the Achilles tendon rupture suffered by goalkeeper Claudio Bravo.
It might be premature to label a crisis for the club but the lack of experience in Ederson’s understudy, Daniel Grimshaw, will be of concern to Guardiola – particularly if the Brazilian stopper suffers any misfortune this side of Christmas.
And so Berrada faces another shortterm versus long-term debate, accentuated by the sales of Joe Hart and Angus Gunn in the summer.
Bravo, who travels to Barcelona today for further tests, is likely to miss the rest of the season and the club would be riding their luck in a 60-game season with only two goalkeepers on their books.
One option would be to sign a free agent, but there are none that seem to fit Guardiola’s demands.
It leaves an enforced January recruitment drive a real possibility. Bravo is 35, after all, and while his penalty heroics in last season’s Carabao Cup glory were welcomed by City fans, they served only to lessen the memory of his unconvincing debut season at the Etihad.
Now might be the time for Berrada and Co. to bring their planning forward again.