Tottenham Can Look to Italy for a Way to Beat City

A quick perusing of some key results over the course of Manchester City’s season might settle some nerves for Tottenham fans coming into this Sunday’s match.

Manchester City have lost nine times in all competitions so far this season. One of those losses, of course, came at the hands of Tottenham. Among their other competition in the current top four, City have lost against both Arsenal and Leicester. West Ham, Liverpool, Stoke City and Everton round out the other the domestic losses.

The only team, as yet, that have managed to beat Manchester City twice, though, came from Italy. Juventus handed City losses both home and away in the group stage of this season’s Champions League.

Now, Juventus are Juventus. They are the reigning Serie A champions, and even made it into last season’s Champions League final against eventual victors Barcelona. Them being able to compete with Manchester City shouldn’t be headline news.

At the time of these two wins, though, it was. The Bianconeri were struggling to defend their title in Serie A and even spent a brief period in the lower half of the table. These wins against City, then, were something close to outliers.

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So how did they manage to hand City their first defeat of the season? And then do it again two months later?

The City team Juventus visited in September had won all of their first five Premier League matches by a combined score of 11-0. They were the consensus early season pick to win it all domestically and probably make a deep run into the Champions League. So when Juventus showed up to the Etihad and won pretty convincingly, it was a bit of a shock.

They did so with a tactics set familiar to Tottenham. While City’s players started wide and ended up playing narrowly, Juventus starters narrowly and ended up playing wide.

Though not alike in actual substance – Carlos Tevez, Andrea Pirlo and Arturo Vidal all left in the summer – Juventus’ style was not too dissimilar from the one they used against Barcelona in the Champions League final. It allowed a series of versatile players the ability to defend against City’s strengths while simultaneously attack against City’s weaknesses.

City’s weaknesses then are broadly the same as the weaknesses Tottenham will encounter on Sunday: a plodding defense that plays too high of a line, full-backs with occasionally insufficient defensive discipline and a midfield wholly incapable of dealing with being pressed.

Juventus bested City on the day by having wide players willing and able to track back in support of their full-backs, but also by having midfielders capable of closing down City’s attempts to play out from deeper midfield. Both Yaya Toure and Fernandinho managed to complete more than eighty passes each, but rarely were able to find ways to deliver them into areas of the pitch where City would be most dangerous.

Moreover, those same midfielders found plenty of opportunities to work the area between City’s centre-backs and full-backs. Paul Pogba delivered the assist for Juventus’ equalizer with virtually no one around him.

How does all this translate into hope for Tottenham? It comes mostly down to the fact that the club is overflowing with much of the same types of players as Juventus has on their roster, ones capable of playing a similar two-way game. Tottenham can – much like Juventus – sit back and competently absorb City’s pressure until given an opportunity, at which point they can switch gears and move forward into dangerous areas with numbers.

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Other teams listed above took cues from Juventus’ win over City in September. Stoke and Arsenal both played reactive games featuring narrow defending and wide attacking, while Liverpool and Leicester successfully implemented a central pressing game that completely unsettled City’s presence in their own half. Tottenham won’t need to change much of anything in their current system to yield the same – or better – results come Sunday.