3 hours ago
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The half-time whistle sounded. Greeted with no booing. Greeted with no clapping. Just silence, an accepting rotation to the aisles and walking in unison away from the stands as if in some slow-moving protest.
A strange, strange night for Manchester City. Pep Guardiola doesn’t make 10 changes. Never, ever. Certainly not in the Champions League. Even in the old European format, when they had confirmed themselves as handsome group winners, City played their full first team. It became a running joke.
So when Guardiola labelled a fifth game of this season against Bayer Leverkusen, third in the Bundesliga, a ‘final’, the idea of something wholesale from defeat in Newcastle wasn’t on the radar. So far from the radar that it might as well have been lined up by Savinho.
This selection was a message. Squad game, after all. Guardiola had named the same team for the last three Premier League games because clearly those are the guys he is trusting at the moment. Knowing that cannot last over the winter period – especially Christmas – he clearly wanted to see who is able to stand up for him.
Asking those questions is fine but you have to be ready for the answer. And that was not pretty for City, whose fans were caught in stasis at a mind-bending performance that resembled some of the dirge served up last year.
That said, they didn’t actually lose a European home game last year. This was a first home defeat in a group match since 2018.
It was a strange night for Manchester City as they were beaten 2-0 by Bayer Leverkusen
Pep Guardiola made an astonishing 10 changes against the German side and paid the price
The home support were almost stunned into silence in what became a 'squad game' for City
The result is probably rather inconsequential, given that City will progress into the knockout stages. The deeper meaning behind the setback is more pressing and provides things for Guardiola to fix if they do have ambitions of competing on multiple fronts during a campaign Arsenal are threatening to dominate.
Like why the press was so haphazard because, even though these players never feature together, the basic principles remain the same. Or how Nathan Ake, beaten in the air by a ghosting Patrik Schick for Leverkusen’s second, appears as if his race is now run at the highest level. And why James Trafford didn’t claw the header clear.
Or why Rayan Ait-Nouri didn’t know whether to stick or twist, embarrassingly caught out of position, for Alejandro Grimaldo’s opening goal midway through the first half.
Or why Oscar Bobb is so lacking in confidence that he only wants to play sideways. Or why Rico Lewis, one of only a couple of purposeful performers, was sacrificed at half-time. Or why Tijjani Reijnders chooses to just constantly welly shots straight at goalkeepers. The Dutchman dawdled into the box with all the abandon of a grazing tortoise, seemingly boring defenders into clearing a path.
There will be some who wonder why Guardiola chose to pick all of the squad players together. There might be some who believe it set them up to fail. He will argue that any team City name is good enough to beat most opposition, especially at home, and he would be right.
In that case, there needs to be some introspection on exactly how and why this inertia was allowed to take hold. To watch Omar Marmoush – two goals scored since April, and one of those at Swansea in the Carabao Cup – aggressively gee up a bemused crowd felt more than a touch odd.
Atmosphere works both ways and only when City built some form of momentum – once Erling Haaland, Phil Foden, Rayan Cherki and Jeremy Doku climbed off the bench – did this actually resemble a proper contest.
Guardiola sending for those four, plus Nico O’Reilly, suggested that the test and the experiment had to come to an end – and that he himself thought that the result did need recovering.
The result is probably rather inconsequential, given City will progress into the knockout stages
But the deeper meaning behind the loss is more pressing for Guardiola in his hunt for trophies
City goal machine Erling Haaland came on in the second half but could not rescue the defeat
But Leverkusen are strong, their only defeats in all competitions since August coming against Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich. Chucking the names on was no guarantee of a reprieve.
Ultimately, they will earn one of those in the lengthy league stage. A home tie with Galatasaray and away trip to Bodo/Glimt offer two significant opportunities to sort qualification out. But will Guardiola be quite so quick to trust those who have spent most of the season playing second fiddle? Unlikely.
