With Manchester City desperate for an equaliser against Crystal Palace last weekend, Jack Grealish was taken off. He was also taken off as City sought goals against Paris Saint-Germain and Liverpool. Grealish has started nine of City’s 10 Premier League games since his move from Aston Villa and registered two assists – in the 5-0 win over Arsenal and the 4-1 win over Brighton – and one goal – in the 5-0 win over Norwich. It’s a crude measure and the season is only a quarter gone, but Grealish is yet to deliver game-turning moments in the biggest games or when the pressure is on.
João Cancelo’s hat-trick of assists pulls Manchester City away from Club BruggeRead more
But he is at least doing better than Jadon Sancho, who has started only three league games for Manchester United since he joined from Borussia Dortmund and completed none of them. He hasn’t scored and he hasn’t registered an assist. Worse than that, if the switch to a back three is more than a short-term fix, it’s very hard to see where he has any place in a side that have suddenly done away with wingers.
Saturday’s Manchester derby, quite apart from all the other intrigue, is a meeting of two highly gifted left-sided English forwards who made expensive summer moves and are struggling to adapt to their new environments. Except it probably won’t be because if Sancho is used at all it will almost certainly be from the bench, by which time Grealish may have been substituted.
Grealish is far less of a worry. Wide players at City often take time to settle and get used to the system. Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sané, Riyad Mahrez and Bernardo Silva were far better in their second seasons at the club than their first. Pep Guardiola makes unusual demands and it’s only natural that it should take time for his players to become accustomed to that, perhaps especially if, like Grealish, they have been used to being the creative hub of their team.
Jack Grealish trudges off when Manchester City were 1-0 down during their 2-2 draw at Liverpool. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images
The way João Cancelo operates is a further complication. At Villa, Grealish had Matt Targett overlapping from full-back, offering a passing option and potentially creating space by drawing the opposition full-back away, but Cancelo often goes infield, acting almost as an auxiliary playmaker. Remarkably, Cancelo (who has admittedly played 149 more minutes) has had more touches in the final third than Grealish this season. If Grealish seems less involved creatively than he might be, it may be for the very good reason that he is holding his position, offering a defence against the counter, to allow the attack to develop from different angles.
(Whether Grealish is a wide player at all is another issue: the suggestion in the summer was that Guardiola saw him as an option through the centre, but experiments as a false nine have so far failed to impress.)
Guardiola seems unconcerned, saying that Grealish has come “for four or five years” and that “step by step he will get it”. And it is also true that, as Guardiola said, “he’s facing teams that are set back so, so deep it’s more difficult to find spaces than before [at] a team that typically counterattacked”.
But still, particularly in those games when City have seemed blunt – against Tottenham, against Southampton, against PSG, against Palace – the sense has been of Grealish slowing attacks, of his determination to cast off his previous individuality and submit to the system leading him to take the safer option; balancing the individual and the system is never straightforward. “His positions are always good and he plays [with a] really good football perspective,” said Guardiola. “He creates free men when he has the ball. Every time he has the ball João and Rodri are alone and they can use him or do it the next time so in that time it’s really good. When he gets the ball it always has sense with everything he does. With the confidence and a little bit more time he will be aggressive.”
Grealish’s pass accuracy notably is up on last season, but key passes, shots and dribbles are all down. Which may, ultimately, all be to the good; it’s just that at this stage it feels as though what made Grealish special, his impishness, his capacity for the brilliant or unexpected, has rather been lost. And he doesn’t have the directness of Sané, the player he in effect replaced in the squad.
Ole Gunnar Solskjær speaks to Jadon Sancho after the draw with Atalanta earlier this week. Photograph: Kieran McManus/Shutterstock
Sancho, meanwhile, has simply looked lost. Shots, key passes, dribbles are all dramatically down on last season. For him the issue is the opposite to that faced by Grealish. At Dortmund he was part of a highly systematised structure. Under Lucien Favre, Dortmund pressed hard and high. Sancho knew the triggers and knew where and when to move in relation to other players with and without the ball. It is the absence of that sort of precise organisation that has characterised Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s time in charge at Manchester United, in the past two seasons in an attacking sense and, since the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo, defensively. Sancho, having been used to having a detailed blueprint, is suddenly having to improvise in a way that is unfamiliar to him.
Of course, there is a left-sided forward who is used to bearing the creative burden and devising his own solutions – it’s just that he’s busy trying to subjugate himself to an unfamiliar structure. And that is the oddity of the two biggest transfers of English players this summer: the individualist has gone to a system club and the system player has gone to a club without structure. Both may yet perhaps adapt, but could it be that United and City each signed the wrong player, that Grealish would be better under Solskjær and Sancho under Guardiola?
The caption on a picture was corrected on 5 November 2021 to reflect the fact that Manchester City drew at Liverpool, rather than losing.
