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Manchester City is the expression of a dilemma. It is difficult to determine whether it is tailored to Guardiola or Sergio Agüero. The river belongs to the coach. The technician regulates the flow rate and shapes the basin. But the idol is still there. Sign like a rock stuck in the bed, holding the current, somewhat eroded by the years of slogans and the influence of the environment, perhaps, but always unmistakable owner of its rhythms of irregular genius. As a Premier coach says he prefers anonymity: "The role of nine in the City is marked by Kun, rather than the coach."
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Goleador and able to give continuity to the plays when all his teammates gather around the rival area and the roads are narrowed, Agüero has almost all the qualities required by the Guardiola model at the tips. Only one is missing. At 31, the Argentine exhibits the same lack of rigor as when he was a teenager. He has a tendency to get carried away in training and in the face of repeated difficulties he tends to surrender to a more playful than competitive temperament. Guardiola has noted with annoyance and Real Madrid with jubilation. Because Agüero could never beat Madrid in the 14 games he played with Atlético and City. His balance is four goals and four assists for nothing. Five draws and nine losses. Never under the direction of Guardiola, who does not stop proposing formulas to plug it in and to plug in others.
Member of the technical team of the Argentine national team during the World Cup in Russia and a student of the Guardiola model, Matías Manna defines the role of nine by its context: “The question is not what is the role of nine in the Guardiola model, but who and how he passes it to the nine , and who surrounds the nine . What would Kluivert have done without Litmanen nearby? And Pele without Gerson ...? The nines tend to suffer the latest trends: midfielders arriving in attack and defense replacing the control midfielders. Isolated, the nines are unmarked but there is usually no pass. And if there is, there are no companions nearby. ”
Manna puts the emphasis on the mediapuntas that usually accompany Agüero starting from the interior lanes or the bands getting in the middle, such as De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, David Silva or Gundogan. "It is not the same Agüero with two fixed ends stuck in the band, than Agüero with two halfpuntas getting well close to him," says the coach.
The day he awakens his aggressiveness is devastating. But there are frequent matches in which he simply goes out to the field to surrender himself to enjoyment. You can afford it. Most rivals cannot resist even their most hedonistic facet: in nine seasons in the City he has become the third top scorer in the history of the Premier with 180 goals, only behind Rooney (208) and Cole (187 ). When Guardiola signed in 2016, he was found solidly installed in the seat of the most revered and highest paid soccer player in the club with a salary that exceeds ten million euros net annually.
In the absence of a better nine in the market, the technician surrounded him with accomplices in a tenacious attempt to shake his feet and conscience. Two ends, two sides, and two interiors usually combine with it in the final meters. Even Laporte, the center, or Rodri, the midfielder, look for him by filtering lines so that he leaves the ball facing the flyers. The associative effect multiplies the scoring performance of the entire team while the Buenos Aires numbers remain: he averaged a goal every game and a half in five seasons without Guardiola and a goal every game and a half in four years under the direction of Catalan . Raheem Sterling, the second tip, has instead experienced a flowering. Exploiting the lane that opens between the centrals and the left-backs, Sterling has doubled his correct goalscorer with Guardiola: from 24 points in 126 games to 53 in 123.
Assault on the 'pockets'
Agüero has not only helped Sterling find entry routes to the rival area. A coach who has faced the City recently observes that the great function of the tip is to help occupy what he calls “pockets ”, the field bags that are released between the centrals, the sides and the steering wheels of the teams when they fold to defend themselves . "What Guardiola wants," observes this technician, "is that the spaces to the left and right of Kun are always free for David Silva, Bernardo, De Bruyne, or Gundogan to occupy. Those are the spaces that he always says are the most difficult to defend for rivals. If you put a nine that fixes the two centrals in a line of four, the spaces that are left and right of those centrals are difficult to defend. They are the clearest points to arrive or to filter the penultimate pass ”.
"It is possible that in your first swing you close the interior spaces," says this coach. "But if they fix the power stations and they will take you to the other side, maybe the end and the side of the City will be free and there they have already penetrated you and from there comes the last pass."
Far from the Agüero area it is not the most effective dribbler. But in that scenario overpopulated by the strangers of the last meters it is brilliant to find his teammates with subtle touches the same as to stir with the ball controlled towards the goal. “There, both are important,” explains Juanma Lillo, who has worked with Guardiola and with the technical staff of the Argentine national team, “provided they know when to interpret when one and when the other. The Kun settled into the City game because the smaller the spaces, the better he manages, for how he is, a little guy with a low center of gravity. Since they all play very close together, that benefits them. He handles relations in short spaces very well, and the receptions, if he makes them towards goal, the ball is left half a millimeter from the body and it is very easy to penalize him ”.
Ramos and Varane will have work to take the Agüero brand. If they succeed, they will be presented with a second problem: Sterling, De Bruyne and the Silva will arrive from behind. Like the torrent that envelops the rock.
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