City stars left feeling Blue in slow start to

CONSIDERING there are 16 City players at the World Cup. the club’s presence hasn’t been felt too much at the tournament as of yet.

Either restricted to the bench or performing under par, the Blues’ big stars have mostly continued for their countries where they left off for their club following the 2-1 defeat to Brentford before domestic football screeched to a halt.

The Blues centre-backs in Qatar – John Stones, Manuel Akanji, Nathan Ake, Ruben Dias, Aymeric Laporte and additionally Rodri who has been moved into the back-line for Spain – have all played integral roles for their nations but it has been disappointing for everyone else.

The big talk over the last few days from an England perspective has been about Phil Foden after Gareth Southgate didn’t bring him on off the bench in the drab, goalless affair with the United States. While it’s hard to argue he deserved a place ahead of Raheem Sterling, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford or Jack Grealish – all of whom scored against Iran – it was frustrating to see Mason Mount being so ineffective with Foden right there.

Yet, Southgate had a point when he said he hasn’t been operating in midfield for Pep Guardiola, while he is yet to reach his best club form for his country.

Grealish did score the last goal in the opening game but offered little against the USA. Recovering duo Kyle Walker and Kalvin Phillips are yet to feature.

Kevin De Bruyne’s Belgium are in trouble after they only managed to scrape past Canada and were then defeated by Morroco. If they don’t beat Croatia in their final game then they

will be out. De Bruyne won the Man of the Match award in the first match but even he admitted he didn’t deserve it. The midfield maestro has been well short of his usual incredible standards.

Ilkay Gundogan scored from the spot but that wasn’t enough to prevent his side from losing to Japan and Julian Alvarez’ Argentina suffered a historic shock against Saudia Arabia.

Both sides bounced back with positive results in their second matches which should see them advance but they may struggle to go too much further.

Joao Cancelo put in a pretty dreadful display for Portugal which nearly cost them against Ghana, Bernardo Silva had a quiet match and Ederson is unlikely to see a minute of action as he is behind Alisson in the pecking order for Brazil.

There is still plenty of time to turn it around of course but the majority of City’s stars are either playing worse than they can or hardly playing at all.