Manchester City were not good against Arsenal on Sunday and also seemed to depart from what Enzo Maresca has said he wants. The Community Shield defeat has prompted questions about whether City will struggle in the Premier League, or if Maresca's attention was already on the bigger prize.
Surprising team selections
Fans who have watched Maresca's team this summer could be forgiven for scratching their heads at the performance. After many dots had been joined, particularly with the Asia tour in the last fortnight, Maresca made a number of surprising calls that had the effect of making the team look worse.
Obviously, they haven't played a team as good as Arsenal before the weekend, but it still felt like City were suddenly far less than the sum of their parts. That was even stranger given the fact that they had included four of their best players in the starting XI despite the fact they had only just returned from their holiday.
Was the performance a worrying sign?
Was the 90 minutes a worrying sign of the decline at City after losing Pep Guardiola that will soon become apparent in the Premier League? Possibly, but some of Maresca's decisions were such a jolt from his previous work that plenty of the panic that has swirled around the performance may be misplaced.
Starting with the four returning players, sticking Erling Haaland, Elliot Anderson, Nico O'Reilly and Jeremy Doku straight back into the starting lineup after just a few training sessions looked like a manager intent on winning a trophy. Why else would you bundle them back in when there were other options that had had more time to take in what Maresca wants?
Maresca explains his plan
According to the manager after the game, it was the best chance of having them ready to start against Bournemouth this weekend and the opening matches of the season was to play them from the off and withdraw them rather than put them in a less familiar position of coming off the bench.
"Sometimes players prefer to start doing the proper warm up and start from the beginning," he said. "The plan was to change all of them after 45 minutes or one hour maximum so it's a decision that you take before the game." In other words, the primary motivation for starting them against Arsenal was to accelerate their readiness for the start of the actual season.
Anderson in particular had a chastening afternoon being played out of position. Days after Maresca had been clear that the former Forest man's best roles are as a No.6 or a No.8, he was shunted out to the right in a weird floating role that suited neither him nor poor Mateo Kovacic, who was swamped as the sole holding midfielder.
There were a couple of glimpses of Anderson's attacking potential from the right side of the pitch, with two excellent balls into the box for Haaland and Doku, but it still felt unusual. As did the omission of Matheus Nunes, who has been backed as the club's first-choice right-back to the extent that plans to sign some competition for him in the transfer window have been shelved; in his absence, Abdukodir Khusanov had a difficult afternoon along with the rest of the defence.
Other surprises and the bigger picture
Those two calls made City's afternoon all the more difficult and raised questions of Maresca, but what he had said and done before Sunday suggested that the Community Shield will be the exception rather than the norm in those respects. City should look considerably better with Anderson in a more comfortable role and Nunes strengthening the defence.
The other surprise of the day was Jack Grealish coming on for the second half, having spent last season on loan at Everton and then missed the summer tour with City still planning to move him on in the transfer window. His minutes could have been more helpful for Rayan Ait-Nouri, for instance, yet it is also fair to say that any clubs with interest in signing the £100m man will have been pleased with what they saw on Sunday and that could help to seal a deal.
As a first major test for Maresca, Sunday was a flunk that leaves questions over how he is going to get his ideas across and whether they will be good enough to challenge for the Premier League and Champions League. At the same time, some of the calls were so uncharacteristic it could quite easily point to a longer game being played.
Defeat in the Community Shield, especially in the manner that it happened, has seen many cast strong and immediate judgments about Maresca's City. The coming weeks may well show that isolating 90 minutes was never going to produce anything like a full picture of what this team will be about.
