Manchester City 0-2 Wolverhampton Wanderers: 5 Talking Points | Premier League 2019-20
Wolverhampton Wanderers visited the Etihad Stadium, to take on the defending champions Manchester City on matchday 8 of the Premier League. In a shocking result, the defending champions fell to a defeat against Wolves. They are now the first and only side to win away at Manchester City while keeping a clean sheet after Pep Guardiola took over.
Wolves took the lead in the 80th minute of the game after a goalless first half. Adama Traore scored the goal after Raul Jimenez's run to set him up. 10 minutes later, Traore added another goal to close the game out for good.
With this result, Manchester City has now lost two games and shared points in one - thus dropping eight points along the way. Liverpool, who holds a 100% win record this season, is now comfortably sailing ahead of their rivals on top of the table.
Here are five talking points from the game.
#5 Pep Guardiola's gamble with the squad a bit too much?
It is tough to understand the intentions of Pep Guardiola at times. At Norwich, he left Kevin de Bruyne on the bench for 55 minutes before introducing him. In the same game, he let Raheem Sterling complete the 90 minutes and took Bernardo Silva out despite the latter being the more effective threat.
Today again, he messed up with his lineup. Pep went with a 4-2-3-1 with Sergio Aguero upfront. With all due respect, Sergio Aguero was sub-standard against Norwich in the first league game City lost. Also, he was poor against Dinamo Zagreb in the mid-week game where he ended up losing sevn ground duels out of 10. Sure enough, even today he as poor with his touches and duels - losing three out of five duels.
Pep also decided to play Joao Cancelo on the left-side instead of Oleksandr Zinchenko - another strange decision and the Portuguese international ended up giving the ball away for the Wolves' first goal.
The decision which seemed utterly dubious was leaving Bernardo Silva on the bench. Kevin de Bruyne not being on the pitch takes a hit on creativity and Bernardo is an option who should be preferred ahead of Ilkay Gundogan, David Silva, or Riyad Mahrez. Yet, Pep left him on the bench despite him not playing the full minutes in every game.
It surely came back to haunt City. They were improving when Bernardo was subbed in and began to get on the ball but it was too little too late to break apart a Wolves team who were into their groove in the defence by then.
Pep has a great squad at disposal but he seems to be throwing random cards on the pitch just because everyone could play possession football.