Enzo Maresca blamed his side’s lack of desire and the way they were outgunned in duels for a third successive Premier League defeat. After winning their first seven games of the season, Manchester City’s 3-1 loss at Nottingham Forest extended their poor run.
Jair Cunha dispossessed Josko Gvardiol to score the opener, then Liam Delap struck twice with muscular surges on the break as Forest won their first home league game since April. “Today I think [the problem] has been general,” said Maresca. “It’s not about one player. In the first half we lost all the duels, all the contacts. Against this team, that is fighting relegation, if you don’t match them … it’s something we need to understand. In this kind of game, if you’re not able to win duels and second balls like in the first half, you struggle.
“You need desire and intensity to win second balls and duels. You require intensity or you struggle and we didn’t match their intensity. The second and third goals are copy and paste, lost duels first in the middle of pitch then at the edge of the box.”
City’s 100% record came to an end with a 2-1 defeat away by Aston Villa, and they followed that up last week with a 1-0 home reverse against Brighton. “They are all different,” said Maresca. “But if you look at chances, possession, chances inside box, in all of them we were much, much better but we lost all of them. We’re going to use this international break to clarify what we can do better. We know we need to improve things and avoid this kind of game.”
After his frustrated reaction to last week’s defeat at Brentford, Oliver Glasner was understandably delighted that his reset, ending what he had referred to as compromises, had paid off.
“The way we play football I think we’ve had many better games,” he said. “But how we defended, how passionately we defended, how tactically smart we defended, it was one of our better games.
“You should control everything and if you want to control it, you have to run because you have to be so quickly aware – they’re so good, such great players, such a good structure and they move the ball so quickly. Of course, you can just defend but you also need to go forward and this is what we did today in the right moments.”
