Superb Bernardo can’t offer Sane presence on wing

WING PROBLEMS AFTER the Community Shield win at the beginning of the season, Pep Guardiola was so thrilled with Bernardo Silva that he referred to Manchester City as Bernardo plus ten.

He repeated it ahead of the Everton game and nobody that has seen the last six months of football can have been surprised. Where injuries have ruined Kevin De Bruyne’s year and time has suggested it may finally be coming for David Silva, Bernardo has been the beating heartbeat of an elite team very much alive in four competitions.

With Ilkay Gundogan also impressing his manager, there were five central midfielders named in the team against Arsenal.

Fernandinho had to spend some time in defence and Bernardo was pushed out wide on the right, but the nature of the 3-1 win meant any pre-match questioning of the selection was glossed over.

The problem at Goodison was that Sane spent the first half giving a flawless performance of a professional player unaware that the offside rule existed, a problem only defensible if he’d watched the West Ham game on Monday without the sound on and concluded that it doesn’t apply anymore.

Bernardo, talented as he is, cannot offer what Sane and Sterling can.

That doesn’t matter when you have a player in form as Sterling was against Arsenal but when it goes wrong it makes it more difficult to switch the play, relying on one player to improve his game.

EXPLOIT THE WEAKNESS THIS was a game between two teams particularly bad at defending set-pieces. Going into the game, only Brighton had conceded more than Everton while no team has a heftier percentage of goals conceded than City, with Laurent Koscielny’s header from a corner the tenth coming from a dead-ball situation out of a total of 20.

Both Guardiola and Marco Silva, then, you would imagine, will have spent plenty of time in the buildup practising at both ends of the pitch to make sure they could shore up their weaknesses and exploit those of the other team.

In the end, City’s attack was better than Everton’s defence more than Everton’s attack was better than City’s defence. A whipped corner after 16 minutes should have been nodded in by Aymeric Laporte but the Frenchman made no such mistake with a more difficult chance on the stroke of half-time when David Silva sent the free-kick in.

WALKER’S REDEMPTIVE MOMENT WITH the score 0-0 in a tense first half, Tom Davies charged forward to chase ball in the box and Kyle Walker rushed to meet him – with a similar abandon to his fatal penalty giveaway against Crystal Palace – then steadied himself, allowed Davies to get there first but put himself in the way of danger.

The England defender always seems to have at least one moment of madness in him but he has been increasingly excellent since the Newcastle game and had his best game in a good while at Goodison Park.