Top Guer can be answer to Pep’s troubles
DORTMUND ACE CAN SOLVE CITY’S LEFT-BACK ISSUES
AT the start of the season, left-back seemed like one of the lowest priorities for City.
Aleks Zinchenko looked accomplished in the 5-0 openingday win at West Ham and seemed set to make the position his own after stepping in during Benjamin Mendy’s injury absence the previous season.
Angelino was back from an impressive year at PSV Eindhoven after City exercised a buy-back option.
And there was Mendy, too, if the Frenchman was able to get a run of games together.
But things don’t always go to plan.
Zinchenko hasn’t always convinced in the way Pep Guardiola would have hoped, while Angelino - sent on loan to RB Leipzig in January - has made noises hinting at a desire to stay in Germany.
Mendy, meanwhile, has stayed relatively healthy, featuring more often than in either of his previous two City campaigns, but there may still be cause for the Blues boss to pursue a new left-back option once the transfer window opens.
And if Guardiola was watching Saturday’s Bundesliga Revierderby, the answer to his problem may have been staring him in the face.
Dortmund set up with three at the back in their victory over Schalke, with Raphael Guerreiro operating more as a wing-back than an orthodox full-back, so the Portuguese’s two-goal contribution should be assessed in that context.
Nevertheless, the former Lorient man is the sort of player who could offer City a lot in a back four role.
Guardiola has long been a fan of full-backs who get forward and support his attack, be it David Alaba at Bayern Munich or Dani
Alves on the right-hand side at Barcelona, and we shouldn’t be too surprised to have seen him attempt to use Zinchenko - a midfielder in his younger days - into a left-back in his City set-up.
Guerreiro is the best of both worlds, playing a more expansive role with Dortmund but also slotting in as a more orthodox leftback during Portugal’s Euro 2016 and 2018 World Cup campaigns. This season, though, he has seven goals and two assists in the Bundesliga, pointing to someone who is as much an attacking threat as he is a defensive asset. City’s attacking approach certainly lends itself to an overlapping left-back, or at least one with the capacity to get up and down the pitch at will. Guerreiro has covered more than 208km in the league this season, and while a couple of team-mates have covered more
Guerreiro looks like the ideal player to help City put their left-back woes behind them Tom Victor