da gbg bet： As Celtic showed the world on Wednesday night, you can make Manchester City look sluggish if you pressurise them enough.
da spicy bet： Perhaps the most striking thing about the 3-3 draw between the clubs on Wednesday night was the fact that Celtic played fire with fire. There may be something to the fact that the crowd at Celtic Park probably don’t allow their teams to play at home and not have a go at attacking the game, but they certainly did play City at their own game.
In the end, City dominated the possession, but for large swathes of the first half, that didn’t happen, and we haven’t been used to that for the last couple of months. Brendan Rodgers got his team to hassle and harry Manchester City, allowing them no time on the ball.
And the thing about good teams who take the world by storm is that the second they slip up in one way or another, everyone else learns something. So you can bet that Mauricio Pochettino will have learned something from that pulsating draw at Celtic Park, too.
And that will have been all about pressuring City, of course. This is a team who are in the early stages of their metamorphosis from Pellegrini side to Guardiola side, so it’s natural if they aren’t totally comfortable in their style of play just yet. Putting them under pressure very quickly means that the ball-carrier needs to know exactly where his team mates will be so that he can move the ball quickly, something he may not know without thinking at this stage of the season.
But most coaches know that you can’t press City for 90 minutes. It’s simply too difficult, and on Wednesday night Celtic had to pick their moments – and after about 70 minutes or so they stopped almost completely, turning the final moments of the game into the kind of game we’ve seen for most of the season: Manchester City domination.
Mauricio Pochettino, however, knows that his side are capable of giving a little bit more than that. Over the two and a bit years he’s been the manager, Tottenham have done a lot of fitness work, and that tends to manifest itself most obviously in the late goals they score, and the fact that they seem to come into their own slightly later on in the season.
That doesn’t mean, however, that Tottenham can put City under pressure for 90 minutes. It doesn’t work that way. There’s just no way you can ask your players to do that, no matter how fit they are. But when you have a very fit squad who are used to pressing intensely, then what you can ask them to do is press slightly harder at the start of the game, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be too tired later on.
Celtic found that putting City under pressure early didn’t give them time to settle. The early goal came from a well-worked set-piece, but Celtic were able to draw two simple fouls from City defenders inside the first ten minutes of the game, one of which led to a goal and the other a Claudio Bravo save from a Kolo Toure effort.
Rodgers did, however, have to choose his moments. He talked after the game about ‘educated pressure’, his players had to be aware of positions of teammates and opposition players alike, they needed to know when pressing was futile and when it was going to be effective. If you’re pressing Nicolas Otamendi, for example, you might get more joy than if you’re pressing Fernandinho; if you’re the striker and you’re pressing the goalkeeper, which defender are you leaving free in order to apply the pressure?
The moral of the story there is you can rattle City early on, but you need to know what you’re doing. On Wednesday night, it wasn’t just a case of running around like a bull in a china shop, it was a case of picking and choosing the right moments to apply the pressure.
You can imagine Sunday afternoon will be a whirlwind game of football if Spurs press City to their maximum and City move as much as they usually do. And attacking them like that might just be the best way to approach the game.
Spurs have the strongest defence in the division so far, having conceded only three goals, but City have the strongest attack and average three goals per game. Something has to give in that regard, and you get the feeling that it’ll probably be Tottenham’s defensive record. But as Celtic showed, you can concede three goals to Manchester City and still get something out of the game if you put their defence under pressure.
This could be a classic.