Why are City in such poor form?

The last few games has seen the worst City performances I can remember for many years. To be blunt, we have looked a shambles. What has gone wrong? Why are City playing so badly?

With hindsight, certain signs of weakness and poor form have been there all season. The home defeat to Stoke showed that our attack is not as potent as it was last season and that we are vulnerable to the counter attack. Then, the away game at Aston Villa may have provided a template for teams to beat us. For much of that game Villa played a high intensity counter-attacking game and City looked vulnerable. Only the combination of Villa's players tiring late on and the introduction of Fernando stopped the counter attacking. Villa are a poor side but the warning was there and better sides have paid attention and taken advantage of it.

West Ham, CSKA Moscow and QPR all played with a game plan very similar to Villa. High intensity, pressing, and fast direct counter attacks. City have not been able to cope, losing two and only avoiding defeat in the third thanks to the genius of Sergio Aguero. So why have we not been able to handle this style?

Perhaps the most important reason is that we aren't scoring as many goals. Last season City were blowing teams away. This meant our opponents couldn't risk playing this way as we would rip them apart. This season, as demonstrated by the early defeat to Stoke, we aren't likely to do this. This is due to a combination of injuries to key players (e.g. Silva and Nasri), poor form (Dzeko's form has fallen off a cliff) and not replacing Negredo. As a result, our opponents are able to take more risks and attack us more.

This has exposed a weakness at the heart of City's team. Playing with just two in the centre of midfield worked for most of last season as most teams sat back and didn't put the two under pressure. But in a couple of key games (e.g. Bayern in the Champions League and Chelsea at home in the league) City was badly outnumbered in midfield. This has happened much more often this season.

Much has been said about Yaya Toure's poor form. While this is a factor, a bigger factor is that a weakness in Yaya's style of play has been exposed. Yaya has been likened to a Diesal engine on the pitch, but for me a better comparison is to an Ent from Lord of the Rings. Ent's are slow to get going but when they do are powerful, destructive and almost impossible to stop. The key here is the slow to get going. Yaya is a wonderful player but he can take a little time to get up to speed. The problem this season is that this has left him looking off the pace whenever we have been hit with high intensity, fast counter attacks.

The exposure of our soft centre has left the back four with little protection and being hit at pace. No back four is going to look comfortable faced with that, and our's has often been left looking a shambles.

So how do we fix this? In the long run the best way would be to start scoring lots of goals again. This would mean teams are more cautious and so there is less pressure on the defence. Unfortunately that is likely to take time to get everyone fit, back in form and get the teams confidence up again. The immediate solution though, is to strengthen the midfield. An extra body in the middle to break up the counter-attacks we are so vulnerable to would help. This would relieve the pressure on the defence and hopefully allow some confidence to return.

A positive sign is that this was tried against QPR which shows that Pellegrini may recognise the issue. I'm not too concerned it didn't have an immediate impact, After the debacle that was the CSKA Moscow game, it may take a few games to turn it around. Hopefully we stick with it and turn things around over the next few games.