Enzo Maresca Faces Tactical and Mental Challenges After City’s Losses
Enzo Maresca walked into the City Ground press room looking less angry than unsettled. Not confused, exactly, but irritated by something he couldn’t quite rationalise. His team had just lost for the third league game in a row after opening the season with seven straight wins. That sequence – seven wins, then three defeats – has happened only once before in the history of the English top flight, to Sheffield Wednesday in 1904-05. It is the sort of oddity that makes managers stare a little too long at the numbers.
The numbers, on the face of it, are his ally. Again.
At Aston Villa a fortnight ago, City saw 63% of the ball and created 15 chances to Villa’s eight. They lost 2-1. At home to Brighton, they had 62% possession, 21 efforts to seven. They lost 1-0. At Nottingham Forest, the dominance was almost absurd: 79% of the ball, 12 chances to 11. They lost again.
Maresca’s verdict was that each defeat was different. The spreadsheets back him up to a point. City can argue they’ve been unlucky, that in most metrics they have controlled every one of those games. Forest, for their part, could counter that they arrived on Saturday sitting third in the league for expected goals but second-bottom for actual goals. Sooner or later, those numbers were going to correct for somebody.
Yet one statistic cuts through all the nuance and should be keeping Maresca awake.
City have not kept a clean sheet since that statement win at Anfield after the last international break, nine matches ago. The game before that, they shipped three to Sunderland. Across the last eight outings, they have conceded 17 times. Three of those goals can be pinned at least partly on Gianluigi Donnarumma’s mistakes, but blaming the goalkeeper only goes so far. The pattern runs deeper than a bad night with the gloves.
This is a structural problem. City are fragile in transition, and Forest tore at that weakness with relish. It is not a new criticism of a Maresca side. At Leicester and at Chelsea, he was accused of being overly cautious with the ball, of slowing games to a crawl. But that conservatism in possession has always been a trade-off for how aggressively high he wants his back line to stand.
Play that high and duels become non-negotiable. Lose your battle, lose the ball, and the whole system is naked. A single turnover exposes a back four with acres behind it. That risk is amplified when the centre-forward charging into that space is Liam Delap, a striker who looks like he has just remembered exactly how to hurt defenders and seems intent on making up for a year and more of frustration.
Maresca’s annoyance after Forest was not just about the goals. It was about the fight. City were outfought in the first half, second-best in the collisions that his football makes so critical. When they lost it, they lost it cleanly. Forest ran straight at a defence that had nowhere to hide.
His midfield selection did little to protect them.
Maresca has nailed his colours to Enzo Fernández. City paid £125m to take him from Chelsea, a fee that underlines just how highly the manager rates the Argentinian. Fernández is an elegant, incisive footballer, but by Premier League standards he is not a destroyer. When he and Cole Palmer lined up together at Chelsea, the team often looked light in the middle, easy to shove off course. Maresca’s response back then was to contort his shape, asking Malo Gusto to morph into a strange right-back-cum-No 10 hybrid just to keep Fernández on the pitch.
The same tension is creeping into this City side. Rayan Cherki is a lavishly talented attacking midfielder, all imagination and flair. What he is not is a reliable defensive presence. His positioning can be loose, his tracking intermittent. Pep Guardiola flagged that last season. Physically, he can be overpowered.
That is manageable when there are two tireless runners behind him: one shuttler to eat ground – the Elliot Anderson type – and a dominant holding midfielder in the Rodri mould to close doors and win duels. But Rodri has gone. Fernández is not that player. Anderson is being asked to carry almost all of the heavy lifting without the same security net.
So when Anderson is bypassed – when a defender misplaces a pass in a bad area, or a counterattack simply sprints past him – City are suddenly wide open. One mistake and the whole structure feels flimsy.
Maresca spoke after the Forest defeat about using the international break to reassess, and for once a manager meant it when he said it might be good not to have a game immediately to “put it right”. He needs space to think. Perhaps there is a tweak, a new balance, some way to keep Fernández and Cherki on the pitch without leaving his centre-backs exposed on every turnover. Perhaps the answer is as brutal and simple as not playing them together.
He also knows time is not a luxury he can assume he has.
By the time the Premier League resumes, City’s season could look very different. Not just in the title race, but in the standings full stop.
It was during the last international break that the independent panel announced City had been found guilty on all but one of the charges brought by the Premier League. There is a growing expectation that the sanctions – and any points deduction – could drop during this break. Nobody outside the process can say with certainty how that looming punishment is seeping into the dressing room, how it feels to chase games with the threat of a huge hit to the table hanging overhead.
Defiance can only burn so long. If that early anger has cooled into something closer to resignation, it shows up in the dark places of a match: in the 50-50 you don’t quite commit to, in the second ball you don’t quite chase.
The problem in front of Maresca is tactical. It is also mental. And unless he solves both, fast, the next time he looks up at the table he may not be worrying about a title charge at all.
