City 0, Brighton 1: 21 Shots, 0 Goals, and Doku Beat His Man Then Wasted It

We had the ball for 62% of the afternoon. We took 21 shots to Brighton's 7. We had 63 touches in their box and they had 9 in ours. We created 5 big chances, missed all 5, hit the woodwork twice, and lost 1-0 at home to a set piece in the 11th minute. That's two league defeats in a row after Villa last week, and we're only still top of the table because we banked enough before this run. I'm not mad at the effort and I'm not even that mad at the midfield. I'm mad because the attack had the whole game handed to it on a plate and gave us absolutely nothing back, and the guy who wasted the most of it was Jérémy Doku.

21 shots and 5 big chances, and not one of them went in.

The goal was Yasin Ayari again, off a set piece, De Cuyper with the assist. I said it after the cup game on Wednesday and I'll say it again: Ayari is just a solid player, and Brighton keep getting him into spots where he only needs one touch. But it was a terrible defensive effort from us, again. Gvardiol is becoming more of a mid defender every time he has to play left-back, and this was the worst game I've seen him play in a City shirt. Absolutely abysmal. FotMob gave him a 7.1 and I genuinely don't know what game they watched. I've got him at 35. When he and Ndiaye came off at 79' I wasn't sad to see one of them go.

The midfield is the part I actually enjoyed. Bouaddi was a willing runner from the first whistle, and young legs go a long way. FotMob has him at 5.9 and I've got him at 70, because the numbers miss what he actually does. He played 55 minutes in a role that isn't really his, and I don't know what Maresca is doing with his positioning right now, but other than Anderson he's the only midfielder we have who wants to win the ball back. The aggression, the tackling, the way he reads the game before it happens: that's a true 6 replacement. Anderson finally got to play higher, in the box, in his more comfortable 8 position, and he was so much more there. His linkup with Enzo was really good, he whipped in a great cross at 22', and at 33' he pinged a ball across the entire field to Doku. He was playing like KDB for long stretches of this game. Enzo, for his part, found a ton of space and was playing almost like a false 9, and I thought this was his best game in a City shirt. The midfield did its job. The ball kept arriving in the final third.

That's where Jérémy Doku comes in. He did everything except the one thing that matters. FotMob actually loved him and gave him an 8.2, the highest rating on our side, because the activity numbers are huge: 9 of 15 dribbles, 14 touches in the box, 4 chances created. I watched the game and I've got him at 48, and this was one of his worst games in a City shirt for me. What the stat sheet can't show you is what happened after each of those dribbles. He'd beat his man, win the duel, and then give the ball away. He didn't pick his head up and look for the man, which is the thing he'd been doing so much better lately. 4 chances out of the amount of times he had the ball in that area is lackluster. At 8' Enzo put him into space. At 33' Anderson put the ball on his foot from the other side of the pitch and he has to get something off there. At 40' Enzo was sprinting down the left with nobody near him and Doku didn't find him. At 55' he missed Anderson's run entirely. He took 3 shots and put 1 on target, he missed a big chance, and he completed 23 of 29 passes, which is 79% for a guy whose job is to make the last pass. Dribbling past a fullback is the start of the job, not the job. Today he won the first duel and then had no idea what he wanted to do after it, for 90 minutes. Shambolic. And I'd still start him next game. He deserved the full 90 because he kept getting himself into those spots, and if he keeps getting there the law of averages hands him a goal and an assist sooner or later. He just has to stop wasting it.

Haaland is not part of the problem. He had 4 shots, put 1 on target, and got 0.47 xG out of a game where we were living in their box, and Lewis Dunk threw himself in front of him at 41' with a block that might have been the play of the half. His problem is supply. Enzo kept dropping deep, so nobody was feeding him until Cherki came on and started looking for him straight away. Doku found pockets of space and didn't find Haaland in them. And Ndiaye's instinct is to cut in toward the top of the box instead of driving to the byline and pulling it back, so the two of them don't have the chemistry yet for Haaland to get on the end of anything. Ndiaye was still my man of the match for most of the afternoon. Holy dribbles at 24'. At 49' his touch drew a yellow on De Cuyper, then he drove through the middle and hit the post, and at 76' he was on the end of beautiful linkup play that he has to finish. He's consistently getting in behind, the final product was close, and I wanted him to play the full 90 to get his big chance. Instead he came off at 79'. It just wasn't Ndiaye's day, and once he finds his shooting boots he is going to be a monster.

Credit where it's due, because I'm not going to pretend Brighton just got lucky. Bart Verbruggen made 7 saves and FotMob made him player of the match at 8.8. Brighton are so good at recovery runs and covering space. They made 32 clearances and 16 interceptions, and defensively they are just so sound and hard working. But a great defense still leaves you chances, and we had 5 big ones. A team with title ambitions puts at least one of those away.

Maresca's subs actually helped, even if I didn't love the first one. Cherki came on for Bouaddi at 55', and I'd have taken Enzo off instead, but within 2 minutes Cherki had a key pass into Fernández. At 62' he played a ball into Nunes that was so close to a goal. He's just better in the 10 than anyone else on this team, and by 70' he was hyping up the crowd himself. O'Reilly came on for Enzo at 64' and Allan was lively and aggressive when he came on. Once O'Reilly was on I noticed something. Brighton play man-to-man, so the half-spaces in midfield clear out almost completely. O'Reilly kept filling those spots, which gave Cherki and Anderson support. That's the pattern we need to drill. Overload those half-spaces, play quick, then find the third man in behind, whether that's Ndiaye, Doku, Haaland or Nunes on the overlap. O'Reilly had a great look at 89' and that was the closest we came late.

And defensively we are still so, so scary. Brighton barely had the ball, they had 9 touches in our box all game, and they still made 4 big chances. Every time they got near us it felt like they were about to score. De Cuyper missed an open one early in the second half, and Donnarumma nearly had a howler at 72' playing a ball to Anderson he had no business playing. The one guy back there I trust completely right now is Khusanov. At 36' he literally covered half the pitch to intercept a pass. He completed 85 of 89 passes, cleared it 7 times, and even at 89' he was the main man in their box. His physicality is unmatched and he is seriously becoming a first name on the team sheet.

So is this a blip? Yes, but I'm starting to worry, because the team is starting to look fragmented. The defense keeps letting everyone down, the attack isn't holding up its end when we only concede once, and the midfield outside of Anderson and Bouaddi is lackluster. At the start of the season everything came together off the back of last year, and part of that was Semenyo. He was clinical, scoring and assisting, and he's been out since with a leg injury while Doku and Ndiaye haven't been clinical at all. Maybe I was too hard on Semenyo early on. What this team looks like without him is something I want to dig into properly. A loss or a draw in the next game before the international break, whatever. If we come back from the break and don't pick it back up, that momentum gets very hard to find again, and then I'm worried about the title.

We controlled this game, we created enough to win it twice, and we lost because nobody finished a single chance. No clinical conversion, nothing to show for 21 shots. Not good enough today.