Napoli have the means to put Manchester City's resilience and rhythm to the test
City have been in impervious form but Napoli certainly made Pep Guardiola's men work in their last encounter. Could the Italians successfully disrupt the Cityzens' rhythm this time round?
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Your support makes all the difference.After all the praise that Pep Guardiola showered on Napoli on the eve of their first Champions League meeting, Maurizio Sarri was very willing to return the favour ahead of the return match.
“They were outstanding at the start of the reverse fixture,” the 58-year-old said of that 2-1 win at the Etihad. “We’re up against something huge and they are often two goals to the good after half an hour, so we’ve got to keep things right because they’re not used to that. The start [of a game] is City’s strength.”
In other words, don’t let them score early, so you don’t then have to step out and give City the opportunity to further strip you for parts in the extra space.
It is fairly rudimentary, but then there’s no denying it’s necessary against football that sophisticated, and it’s not like the supreme tactician Sarri - who Guardiola does genuinely respect, even beyond his hyperbole - was giving away the more intricate details of his game plan. He will likely come up with something.
Its success might also mean more than just success in this match, and potentially preventing City winning this group. It might also prevent them running away with the Premier League. There will be a lot of sides looking on.
Because, as utterly supreme as City have been this season, there is still one question that has lingered through this multitude of goals and chances.
What will happen when they are disrupted; when they face a roadblock?
It is genuinely a fair question because of how instinctive their intensely glorious play has felt, as if they are on one of those rare spells of form where a side finds a rhythm without even having to think. Kevin De Bruyne personifies this.
The potential problem is when there’s a setback, though, and that rhythm is broken. A team suddenly has to think again, and they thereby start to second-guess themselves, leading to a hesitation that wasn’t there before. It has happened with so many admired sides, and was especially conspicuous with Arsenal’s 2003/04 title-winning side once their long unbeaten run in the league was finally ended but also with City last season.
That has been the grand caveat to this run, why some have been reserved in their praise. City actually looked this good at the start of last season, winning their first 10 games in all competitions. They ended up winning nothing, though, having never recovered the same kind of verve after Celtic found out how to get at them in the Champions League with a 3-3 draw.
There is thereby an extra edge to this match at the Stadio San Paolo because, since City really began this surge with the 5-0 win over Liverpool at the start of September, Napoli have been the only side to give them proper problems. The Italians were the first since then to really break their passing, to make them look that bit more leaden, and came very close to what would have been a fine 2-2 comeback from 2-0 down.
Napoli couldn’t quite pull it off, though, meaning City could instead point to their resilience in getting a result despite the scare. It emboldened Guardiola’s side rather than impeded them, but the wonder now is whether Sarri and Napoli - and especially the free-scoring Dries Mertens - can pick up on that in their own stadium; whether they can go up a level, and thereby take City down a few.
They are in ominous form, having roared to the top of Serie A with 10 wins from 11 games. Mertens’ pace is also precisely the weapon that is most effective against Guardiola’s high line, in what is likely to be a high-speed game.
The issue is that there is also something ominous about City’s performances beyond the results and how they’ve been achieved. One of the more interesting stats form the weekend was not from their goalscoring, but their passing.
The number of passes they play per game has gone from 598 to 720. That means such a figure has also gone from the lowest since Guardiola became a manager to the second highest, only after his masterpiece 2010/11 third season at Barcelona. City’s actual pass accuracy is even higher than that mesmerising campaign, though, and the Catalan coach’s best-ever at 94 per cent.
If there are many that tune out at the mention of such stats, though, there is a real point here because there can be no better indication of how tuned in City’s players are to Guardiola’s ways. That leap is genuinely impressive, and emphasises the fact that they understand his methods on a deeper level. It also suggests that they wouldn’t quite be disrupted in the same way they were last season, and it says something else that the Celtic setback came a month earlier than now - on 28 September 2016.
Napoli can of course put all that to the test, in what is certain to be a hugely testing game.
To even stop City’s 13-game winning streak would be something, ahead of what is also likely to be a tricky home match against Arsenal at the weekend.
Sarri just needs to come up with that something but, as with the praise for City, that is all too easy to say.
Doing it is very different, but could yet prove the difference in this game, this group - and, just maybe, this season.
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