A Second Successive Defeat as City Fall to Leverkusen

    Amar Zukancic

    Well that was just not good enough was it. City suffered their first loss this season in the Champions League, and their second in a row since they’ve come back from international break. Pep making ten changes to the eleven he put out at Newcastle was obviously too much for them to handle, and it showed on the pitch with probably our worst performance of the season.

    It was a completely spineless and motivationless performance from the second the ball was kicked off, and it never once looked like we were going to come out on top. Nico Gonzalez was the only player to stay in the side from the weekend, and he was probably our stand out player of the match. Rayan Ait Nouri looked good on the left hand side and when he slotted into midfield, but I think we can all agree that O’Reilly has that spot on lock down. Bobb looked alright, Marmoush had a severe lack of service up top, and on the bright side all of the reinforcements off of the bench looked good. Doku, Haaland, Cherki, and Foden showed why they're the stars of this team and did the best with the situation they were in. They created a lot off of the bench and Haaland probably should've had a brace, but by then the game was long gone and being 2-0 up you knew Leverkusen were going to park the bus.

    The one glaring issue and standout on the pitch today was Savio. He really just doesn't seem to be City level. Every time he gets the ball you groan and know he's going to mess it up. He constantly kills attacks, dribbles out of bounds, makes the wrong decision, and freezes up in front of goal. The cherry on top to that terrible performance was in the last ten minutes where we had a counter attack and he was the one carrying the ball. You knew he was going to figure out some way to mess it up, and then he for some reason stopped out of nowhere and then slipped on his bum and lost the ball.

    These have been two very bad back to back performances and we need to fix it up before the weekend. It was our first group stage/league phase home loss in the champions league since September 2018 against Lyon. This could be a make or break game before the schedule congests more next week, and if we lose it can tank our season but if we win in a good way it can kickstart us back to the form we were in before the break. Next up we take on Leeds at the Etihad.