Have 3 domestic losses exposed Manchester City’s Achilles heel?

The 1-0 loss to Arsenal on October 8 marked the first losing streak (two games) of Manchester City in five years. It was in fact their third straight loss if you include the 1-0 defeat to Newcastle United in the EFL Cup in late September.

City missed Rodri in all of the three games because he was suspended for putting his hands on the throat of Morgan Gibbs-White in the 2-0 win over Nottingham Forest on September 23. Without him and Kevin de Bruyne, who won’t play in the rest of 2023 due to injury, City found it seriously difficult to create scoring opportunities in the three losses.

As the club’s ace striker, Erling Haaland didn’t score in any of the three games and didn’t even take a shot against Arsenal. In fact, the whole City team combined made only four shots on target in that game.

However, it’s unfair to excuse City’s poor performance with the absence of one or two midfielders, no matter how important they are to the club, because one of the main reasons behind City’s dominance in Premier League these years was their incredible roster depth. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to exist this season.

City parted ways with many players in the summer transfer window, including Riyad Mahrez and Ilkay Gundogan. In order to fill in the vacancies left, they signed Matheus Nunes, Jeremy Doku and Mateo Kovacic, which cost the club a fortune. Unfortunately, two months into the 2023-24 season, City’s manager Pep Guardiola hasn’t figured out what roles he should give to any of the three.

Kovacic was nothing but a disaster in the game against Arsenal. He was lucky not to be sent off with the two tackles he made in the first half, but it was bad enough for Guardiola to remove him during the half-time break. With no clear role for either Nunes or Doku, Guardiola decided to put Bernado Silva in the deep-lying midfielder position with Kovacic and Rico Lewis on the flanks behind Julian Alvarez and Phil Foden.

None of the five were able to pose much of a threat in front of Martin Odegaard and Declan Rice. City fell into the typical dilemma of a Guardiola team: without the ability to penetrate through the opponents’ defense, the players can only pass without progress on the field.

This was not the first time Guardiola made confusing and incorrect rotations. He seemed to be trying to fix the problems in the starting lineup by sending Nunes and John Stones onto the field in the 68th minute, but City didn’t speed up like Arsenal did when Mikel Arteta subbed in Gabriel Martinelli, Thomas Partey, Kai Havertz and Takehiro Tomiyasu.

The irony is that those four substitutes worked together to score the game-winning goal for Arsenal, further highlighting Guardiola’s failure to make a change, if that was ever his intention.

It’s still too early to reach a conclusion since there have only been eight games in the Premier League season so far. Rodri will come back for City – maybe De Bruyne will next year too. With the deep pockets of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, the club will also be able to sign good players during the winter transfer window.

However, the 1-0 win over City means a lot more to Arsenal than just the three points. It ended their 12-Premier-League-game losing streak to City and marked the first clean win of Arsenal over City in the league. The last time they did it was in April 2012, and it was Arteta who scored the only goal for The Gunners at home.

History sometimes has the best jokes.