Premier League 2018/19: Tottenham vs Manchester City

This analysis first featured on our network manchestercityanalysis.com.

Manchester City continued their fine and unbeaten start to the Premier League season with a 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hostpur at Wembley. In my tactical analysis today I will pay particular attention to the performances of two of Manchester Citys left-sided players; Raheem Sterling and Benjamin Mendy. One was on hot form  the other, well, perhaps not so much.

Bizarre Benjamin

Benjamin Mendy has been growing and growing as a player so far this season at Manchester City. He provided an extremely mature performance against Liverpool at Anfield and has been one of the leagues leading attacking forces. But something was not quite right on Monday Evening in this Premier League encounter. The main thing that will stand out from Mendys performance against Tottenham will be his wild attempted Hayemaker at the end of the game but things had already been fairly bad before that.

Poor Pressing

Mendy appeared to be late to the team press for the majority of the 1st Half. Above we can see an example of this. Mendy has attempted to press Sissoko while Kieron Tripper (off camera) has the ball. Trippier, instead of passing into Sissoko, plays the ball into Lamela. Mendy should follow the white dotted line back towards his goal in order to track Sissoko who is making his run along the white dotted line. This would force Lamela to play the ball backwards and would slow down the counter-attack (solid white arrow). However, Mendy decides to press Lamela along the red dotted line, leaving Sissoko to stride up-field unmanned. Lamela then plays the ball along the solid red arrow and Sissoko is away.

Again, in the