Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini has reportedly ordered his board to make a 32 million pound move for Mesut Ozil in January as the Citizens plan for life without Yaya Toure.
Just what effect Manchester City’s curious midweek game-of-two-halves performance in Moscow will have on the team is open to some conjecture. At Upton Park this weekend, we will see the immediate fall-out from yet another night of frustration and gnashing molars for a team seemingly unable to sink those more pointy teeth properly and effectively into continental football.
Many words have been written and uttered about City’s predilection for European belly flops and the supporters’ lack of total enthusiasm for UEFA’s cash cow competition, but the truth lies elsewhere. City’s owners are desperate for signs of progress on the grand stage and the Champions League quarterfinals and semifinals are the slots in the limelight that will prove to them that the club is being propelled along at the speed they obviously desire.
Manager Manuel Pellegrini’s lofty “five trophies in five seasons” target may have got off to a flying start in 2013-14, but it carries a caveat from sunbaked Abu Dhabi: Domestic trophies are the daily bread, but European success is the yeast that will make the whole glorious mixture rise.
Bread and butter, or indeed pie and mash, visits to the traditional east end of London will hold little interest to City’s power brokers, but it is in this more down-to-earth atmosphere that the Blues must pick up the pieces from the Champions League and maintain the pressure on a fit and athletic looking Chelsea in the top spot.
They are lucky in that they have had an extra day to recuperate and in the fact West Ham have been a traditionally malleable playing partner for some years now, taking it to obvious extremes last season when they shipped nine goals in the two-legged Capital One Cup semifinals and provided the papier-maché resistance on the day City clinched their second Premier League title in three seasons last May.
Games between these sides down the years have produced an array of attractive football, plenty of goals and the feeling that City and West Ham were once cut from very much the same cloth. Indeed the two clubs’ histories are bound somewhat by the Malcolm Allison-John Bond axis, who played for the Hammers in the happy and reconstructed days of the late ’50s and early ’60s before both taking what they had learned to the north when managing the Blues.
Manuel Pellegrini’s Manchester City may still be reeling from their Champions League hangover when they take on a spirited West Ham on Saturday.
Take a quick glance at the league table, however, and you will see the somewhat surprising sight of the Hammers occupying one of those fabled Champions League places. Perched in the giddy heights of fourth place, just behind the other surprise package of the season so far, Southampton, Sam Allardyce’s side are performing well above expectations so far.
City, carrying a slight Moscow hangover and with many a pair of inquisitive eyes trained on them with some interest, have an intriguing task on their hands this weekend.
How to react to the widespread criticism of last Tuesday’s second-half no-show? How to approach an away game against a supposedly inferior opponent who is in a rich vein of form? Who to trust among personnel, who had a collective shutdown against CSKA?
As ever, Pellegrini will be the man with the answers to these questions, but it is also to be hoped that a number of players who have been serving up below-par performances of late — of which Yaya Touré is the obvious and prime example, and certain members of the back four could be included — should now roll up their metaphorical sleeves and bust a gut to get City back to the intensity levels that Pablo Zabaleta made reference to in a Daily Mirror interview on Thursday.
That intensity, which sweeps sides away in a flurry of intricate passing and waves of flowing attack has been known on occasions to tail off toward what was deemed by the Argentine defender as “not good enough” last Tuesday. Any dissolution of intensity results in the lethargic display that almost seemed to be willing City’s Russian opponents to come and collect their reward. Once the momentum has dissipated, moreover, any footballer will tell you, it is almost impossible to crank up the energy levels again in time to avert a disaster.
And so it was last Tuesday, with City finishing the stronger, but unable to turn a slapdash finish into something more accurate and meaningful.
City customarily start their Premier League games with a solid barrage of attacking football, which often delivers a goal to settle the nerves and put the opponent on the back foot. It is this kind of upbeat performance that they must return to on Saturday and, more pointedly, it is this kind of self-belief that they must introduce to their European forays before the stultifying fixture chaos of the Europa League rears its head in the New Year.