Pep Guardiola’s ‘Grealish-Mahrez plan’ is not pretty – but it wins matches

This was a good and bad night for Pep Guardiola’s ‘Grealish and Mahrez’ plan.

If you’re watching a Manchester City game at a ground such as Elland Road, Selhurst Park or Brentford’s Gtech Community Stadium and you think, ‘This is a bit boring’… you may be right.

If you’re a City fan you might want to see Phil Foden and Erling Haaland tearing through a team who may leave them space to break into, but they’re not doing it.

If you’re not a City fan you may have switched on hoping for a rough-and-tumble side to get in amongst ’em and cause an upset, but they’re not doing it either.

And that’s exactly what Guardiola is trying to avoid.

He won’t want that troublesome home side to build momentum, to break forward and rain set-piece balls into the box. And as part of that, he won’t want to see his own players flying forward on the break either.

This very loosely named ‘Grealish and Mahrez plan’ is his way to combat that. It’s a way to slow the game down. Normally, it looks much uglier than the 3-1 victory it produced on Wednesday.

It was a good night for it in Leeds because City were able to create a hatful of chances even before Rodri scrambled in their opener just before half-time.

It was a bad night for it because after Leeds pulled one back late on, the match got chaotic. Exactly the kind of thing Guardiola wanted to avoid. Jack Grealish had already gone off — just before the Leeds goal — but the game, for many reasons, got stretched. City could have been winning anywhere between 4-1 and 7-3.

It was Leeds’ most threatening spell, even as City had two or three golden chances. Doesn’t that sum it up? Something had gone wrong somewhere. And sometimes it’s a ‘spell’, but if City get the approach wrong, that spell can last for an entire game.

The hair-raising 3-3 draw at Newcastle in August was a perfect example. At the risk of re-using this Guardiola quote for the fifth or sixth time this season, this is why.

“When we break the lines we can run, and if you finish the action it’s not a problem, but if you don’t finish you don’t control Saint-Maximin and Almiron,” he said in the press room at St James’ Park, getting to the heart of City’s issues on the day.

The back-to-back champions were given all sorts of problems by Allan Saint-Maximin, in particular. Kyle Walker and John Stones were run ragged. What’s the solution?

“We should spend more time in the final third, give more passes in that moment,” Guardiola volunteered.

“But it’s difficult, because Erling is going, Phil has this aggression to go; if Jack plays there or Riyad (Mahrez) or Bernardo (Silva) play on the right, they are more calm and they help us to be all together, and when we lose the ball we are there and they cannot run.”

That is the nub of it. It’s worth pointing out because those of us who watch City games hoping for one thing or the other — a pulsating City display or a thrilling upset — are usually barking up the wrong tree. We want dynamism and pace, Guardiola wants… well, ‘a thousand million passes’.

Bernardo talked about this before the World Cup began last month.

“I think what he (Guardiola) really wants is for the midfielders and the strikers… when the action is clear, of course we have to attack, but when we feel that the action is not clear we have to try not to force it,” the Portugal midfielder said.

“Because if we force it too much, then we don’t give time to our defenders to join us and then to control the counter-attacks. And when you give time to the defenders to join us, then you can recover the ball quicker and then attack again. That’s what we try to do.”

If City — or any team — play lots of passes and slow the game down, their 10 outfield players will be where they should be, all probably within about 40 yards of each other, and in place to counter-press if they lose the ball. The problem that day at Newcastle, and in any game where they try to attack into space but the move breaks down and suddenly they’re chasing back, is that the defenders — Walker and Stones up at St James’ Park as prime examples — are exposed.

Guardiola gave a perfect explanation of this after Chelsea were beaten 1-0 at the Etihad Stadium last January, and he touched on what fans want to see versus what his players are told to do.

“Chelsea made a step up and that helped us make transitions, and our fans are so satisfied to see that; but if you don’t finish that action, they (Chelsea) can make the transition and they are unstoppable, like Liverpool,” he said.

“There were (opportunities) to do it (counter-attack), they were so clear. But in that moment you have to bring the ball to their half and make twenty-thousand-million passes, that’s the only way.”

The only way! You may think that City could, and should, go out and just out-gun teams. Instead of being cautious, they should use those weapons, like Foden and Haaland, and tear through their opponents, in a ‘You score three, we’ll score four’ kind of way.

And that would certainly be fun. The problem with playing the way they often do at these difficult grounds — think the 1-0 victory at Leicester in October — is that the games are supposed to look ugly. It’s done to stop the other team creating momentum.

When City win those matches, people wonder why they look sluggish, but then we all move on because they did win.

If they don’t win — let’s say they miss their chances, and the other team score on the break or a set piece — it looks like they’ve played awfully. But they’ve played exactly how they were asked to and maybe the key moments haven’t gone their way.

And because nobody wants to see a slow game in the first place, the ones asked to deliver it — the starting XI — are the first in the firing line.

It’s not as if all City games are boring, far from it, but in these matches it’s about understanding what Guardiola wants in this scenario, and what he wants has delivered four Premier League titles in five seasons and has City second this time as the midpoint of the campaign looms.

What Guardiola wants has delivered spectacular goals and thrilling wins — like the 3-2 turnaround against Aston Villa on the final day of last season — but also produced some absolutely forgettable ones (Brentford away last season as a prime example, Bournemouth away in March 2019 is another) that are just as important when all is said and done.

That’s why the Leeds game was a good night for this ‘plan’, for Grealish and Mahrez — with their ability to slow the game down exactly how Guardiola wants them to — to play in a match with a few goals in it. This slower way of playing is easier to digest when accompanied by more goals — but Guardiola would be happy either way.

It’s named after those two players, for the purposes of this article only, because often City fans don’t want to see them in the line-up: ‘Give us Foden and Bernardo, please’.

Grealish was on his way to a stinker at half-time, with the good work he had done for the team massively overshadowed by his increasingly shocking misses. But he rectified things somewhat with two good assists, bringing some balance to his world.

It’s never normally so eye-catching. People are never going to say, “That Jack Grealish is amazing, I love the way he slows the game down!”, but it cannot be overstated how important it is in games that could easily get out of hand — like it did against Newcastle four months ago, and in the final 15 minutes here.

That approach is perhaps the main thing to bear in mind when discussing Guardiola’s teams at this stage in his career — and City are very good at it.

If these type of games are fun, the plan’s probably not working.

(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)