EASY AS ABC TO BEAT AVB
Super City stroll to win over Villas-Boas’ miserable Marseille
There were 14 minutes remaining when Phil Foden dropped a shoulder and sped down the left. he struck a deep cross which raheem Sterling headed back across goal. And there was Ilkay Gundogan to make Manchester City safe. If they had scored another 10 like it, that would have reflected the gulf between these sides. It is encounters like this that makes some think the Champions League needs reform. The problem is, most of the proposals involve setting up even more matches like this.
But that’s an argument for another day.
One team with little ambition, another forced to cut through a barely penetrable forest of obstacles in search of a goal.
The best team won, the dull team lost, so all ended happily. But it was a match only partisan observers could love.
Another mismatch, sadly, although much of that was down to Marseille coach Andre VillasBoas. he appeared to be playing another City. One that hadn’t been beaten 5-2 at home by Leicester during a stuttering start.
Villas-Boas left out some of the creative players that had got Marseille into this position in the first place, Dimitri Payet and Morgan Sanson, and got exactly what he deserved.
An embarrassing scoreline, given the paucity of Marseille’s ambition. The last time Marseille were in this competition, six years ago, they lost every group game — and they are on their way to repeating that distinction already with backto-back defeats.
When the second went in, 2-0 down with 12 minutes to go, VillasBoas finally brought Payet on. It was a pathetic show.
Delightful, then, that City should emphasise the truth of this 90 minutes with a third.
riyad Mahrez slipped the ball to Kevin De Bruyne, whose cross picked out Sterling for a tap-in. It looked easy. By then, it was.
Getting there, however, required real effort. It is not straightforward, hacking their way through 11 white shirts, sitting deep and primed only to frustrate. Maybe
Villas-Boas thought City would run out of legs. Marseille needed to keep a clean sheet for longer than 18 minutes, then.
The moment they needed to chase the game, Marseille looked vulnerable. Might they have given City a game? We will never know.
For City, this was arguably their best performance of the season. They had all the possession, but not the chances their superiority deserved. Villas-Boas may take pride in that.
It can hardly be called a fruitful plan, however, when three goals separate the sides. City have not been as prolific in the Premier League season, but their european form is impressive: two wins and six goals. That’s more like it.
It is an irony that had Payet stayed at West ham he might have been given the chance to start a game against City this season.
As it was Villas-Boas left out Marseille’s most gifted player, and the first half proceeded as one might expect. Attack versus defence. One team with 11 men behind the ball, the other relentlessly probing and passing, dominating possession and the game.
Marseille were as desperately disappointing as Paris Saint-Germain had been to another Manchester side seven days previously. We thought PSG were going to be a match for Manchester United and were desperately let down. We expected Marseille to show at least a little ambition at home and were equally underwhelmed.
Marseille had one shot of note across the opening 45 minutes, a tame effort from distance which ederson gathered safely with the minimum of fuss. That was hardly the modus operandi at the opposite end. Marseille defended stoutly and with massed ranks swarming around City’s players but occasionally panic set in when the strain of it all showed. Such an event led to the opening goal after 18 minutes.
Amidst some frantic mopping up, Valentin rongier attempted a pass out to the full-back position. It was poorly targeted and fell instead to De Bruyne.
Could there have been a worse opponent to hit? The answer came swiftly as De Bruyne responded by whipping in pass which Ferran Torres, appointed false nine for the night in the absence of several strikers, tapped past goalkeeper Steve Mandanda.
It was his second goal of this Champions League campaign, in his second european appearance. The last City player to score in his first two games in this tournament was Mario Balotelli.
Torres resisted the temptation to ask the obvious question. Why always him? Perhaps because the way Marseille were set up anyone in City’s frontline was likely to see plenty of the ball around the goal.
Just two minutes had gone when a De Bruyne volley was deflected over. The pressure was relentless but it was hard to get near to goal through the massed ranks.
‘Rapido, rapido,’ ordered Pep Guardiola, an instruction that needs little translation.
In their defence, his players were going as rapido as they could. In the 14th minute, Phil Foden forced a save from Mandanda, after a lovely chipped pass by Gundogan. Then it was a terrible piece of control from Leonardo Belerdi that allowed Torres to set up Oleksandr Zinchenko, who drove just wide of the far post.
The half ended with City closing on 70 per cent of possession. Sometimes such a statistic can be misleading but, in this case, it seemed to do Guardiola’s men a disservice. One map of player positions, taken after 30 minutes, showed City’s deepest outfield player to be Aymeric Laporte, his average position being the halfway line. Every Marseille player took up an average berth in their own half. There are training exercises less regimented.
Given that not so long ago a French team, Lyon, had eliminated City from this competition, one wondered what might have been achieved with greater ambition from Marseille.
Stepping up the pace in the second half, Florian Thauvin forced a minor mistake from Ederson. What might Payet have done, from the start?