The Regista - Chelsea vs Man City tactical review: How Poch played through Pep's press and found City's weak spot
Tribalfootball.com's tactics expert Connor Holden examines Chelsea's 4-4 thriller with Tottenham and argues manager Mauricio Pochettino has identified a key weakness in Manchester City's game.
In an eight goal thriller between the title holders and “struggling" Chelsea, the teams went toe to toe for 90 minutes, scoring four goals each in a brilliant game of football.
But what did Mauricio Pochettino do to match Pep Guardiola's City side, and play through their press? And why do Chelsea seemingly thrive more against “better" teams? Let's take a look...
CHELSEA BUILD-UP PATTERNS
One of the key factors for Chelsea was how they played through Manchester City's aggressive press, and how they found the space in behind the press to attack the final line of defence.
Something we haven't yet seen from Pochettino was using Enzo Fernandez as the deepest left-sided player in build up, filling into the left-back zone to play out from the back. This is reminiscent of how Toni Kroos is used for Real Madrid to build up play.
This meant that Marc Cucurella would push higher up as an option on the left, whilst Moises Caicedo would come over to create a triangle with Enzo and Cucurella to play out in the deep left areas, the idea of this was to bait Manchester City's press, in order to make quick passing sequences and find the likes of Conor Gallagher, Cole Palmer and Raheem Sterling popping up behind Rodri to attack the City defence.
Above is an example of this, as the triangle would be formed in the bottom left of the pitch, to then play through that aggressive Manchester City press, which included Bernardo Silva pushing up from a holding midfield position to pressure Caicedo and Gallagher.
This then meant if Chelsea could
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