Is Manuel Pellegrini ever going to realise what a liability Aleksandr Kolarov is to the team?
He is so lazy it is unbelievable. I don’t mean lazy in that he doesn’t run around or chase the ball, he does all that. The problem is when he has the ball or is attempting to win it.
He will invariably play a lazy pass straight at an opponent as though he expects the ball to magically pass through him. He does occasionally play decent passes in behind the defence or put in a decent cross or crack in a fierce free-kick but I am not sure that the positives outweigh the negatives with this guy.
Take the goal he scored for Watford today from a corner. Apart from being in danger of conceding a penalty by having both his arms around a Watford striker, he then deliberately flicked the ball with his head. He didn’t need to, Joe Hart had it covered and would either have caught it or punched it out. The flick from Kolarov took it past him and into the net.
Whilst I am sure that these mistakes affect him, he certainly does not give the appearance that they do. He appears not to care, but I am sure he does.
The main problem, for me, is that he never seems to learn and Pellegrini keeps picking him. Now, the argument may be that City don’t have a left back better than Kolarov, which is true if Clichy is the only back up.
Clichy can be relied upon to be caught out of position on a regular basis, miss-time challenges resulting in free-kicks to the opposition and frequent losses of possession, as well as being quite proficient at putting crosses into the stands, thus ending promising attacking moves.
Arsenal must have been quite amused when City expressed an interest and quite amazed when it turned into a concrete transfer.
Bacary Sagna is an improvement on these two and, as he mainly plays at right back nowadays, has to rely on Pablo Zabaleta being injured. This has recently been the case of course and, in fairness, Sagna hasn’t done too badly.
Although the big misses through injury for City are always Vincent Kompany and/or Sergio Aguero, I would suggest that their cause certainly hasn’t been helped by the injury to Zabaleta.
Manchester City enter another transfer window with the headlines about the likes of Isco, Messi and Neymar floating around. Bear in mind, with the likes of Toure, De Bruyne, Sterling, Silva and Nasri already available these are hardly players they need, even though they would be unlikely to turn them down.
They don’t appear to be interested in signing a new left back! For me this would be a priority. Clichy and Kolarov are both the accident waiting to happen and generally offer little to the team over the course of a season.
Once Zabaleta is fit and back in the team I expect Sagna to revert to being the not-quite-as-good deputy.
The game at Watford actually typified what I am saying. Having already mentioned the Kolarov touch that resulted in Watford’s goal, it is only fair to praise Sagna for the excellent cross he put straight on the head of Aguero who never seems to miss in these circumstances.
This, along with the previous cracker from Yaya Toure meant that City won the game 2-1 and, fortunately for Kolarov, his moment of madness was largely forgotten. I hope it is not forgotten by the manager.
City now sit third in the Premier League table, three points behind Arsenal and one point behind Leicester City. Joe Hart put it in a nutshell when he said that City are not playing the way they want to play and are not playing anywhere near as well as they can but, they are still in touch and still have a great chance of winning the title.
City fans will be hoping he is right!
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 