Chelsea (a), PSG (a), Liverpool (a) – how to play the three hardest away games in world football in a week
Sam Lee 2h ago 8
Manchester City will need all the cherries, special pillows and meditation in their armoury over the next nine days as they face arguably the three current toughest away games in world football.
Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea, the champions of Europe, current Premier League leaders and the team that beat City three times at the end of last season; Paris Saint-Germain’s Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and the rest, and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool, who have given Pep Guardiola a real headache in recent years, particularly at Anfield.
It is a rare run of imposing fixtures and one that would stretch any top team, even one as strong as City.
As well as the laptop analysis compiled on planes and buses, Guardiola, his coaches and the countless backroom staff will have to pull out all the stops to keep their players fresh and stress-free.
City have been involved in similar scenarios before, with even more pressure. In the 2018-19 season, they could not afford to drop a single point in the final three months of the season, with FA Cup and European games thrown in, and a year before that they took on Liverpool home and away in the Champions League either side of a potential title-winning clash with Manchester United.
There is a clip from a team meeting during that run, after a defeat at Anfield, that highlights how Guardiola and his players approach situations like these when it comes to the psychological, tactical and physical aspects that will be called upon.
“I don’t want to see bad faces guys, that’s all, OK,” he told his players. “We worked a lot for 10, 11 months to see bad faces in this moment.
“We have to try, and the best way to try next Tuesday (to beat Liverpool in the return leg) is to win the Premier League on Saturday, Man United at home, invite your family, please, to come to the stadium to win the Premier League. That’s enough argument to be happy, to have smiling faces, to win against our big rival and the Premier League, the quickest Premier League ever.
City's gruelling week
Chelsea (a) Sat, 12.30pm
PSG (a) Tue, 8pm
Liverpool (a) Sun, Oct 3, 4.30pm
“Today, just rondos, boxes, because it’s two days after (the game). Do what you need for recovery because we have three games every three days, three days, three days and we need the people. If you need to stay or massage or whatever you want. Eat food, rest good. Enjoy it, guys.
“Guys enjoy it, believe me, it’s so nice to live that, with our people, our families at home, here, to try (to beat United). If not, OK we’ll be sad for 10 minutes then prepare for the Tuesday game when we will be machines and after that whatever happens, happens. If not, Tottenham, Swansea, Huddersfield, we are going to win it, it’s in the pocket guys, enjoy it, go!”
These three games are particularly difficult. Liverpool are in fantastic form, having not lost in 16 matches (winning 12 of them); Chelsea have lost just twice at home in the Premier League since Tuchel arrived, and PSG have yet to drop a point at home this season.
So how do you prepare for a week like this?
Mental preparation
City were almost assured of winning the title in 2019, which would have taken the pressure off somewhat, but Guardiola did try to get his players to focus on enjoying the situation rather than the size of the occasion, and even downplayed the importance of the results, saying that if they were to lose, they would be ready to go again.
That is something that he does often, publicly and privately, and it is regarded as important in terms of sports psychology.
Dan Abrahams, who works with elite sportspeople, including Premier League players, says that if he were working with City this week he would even suggest removing the word “win” from the conversations that Guardiola and his staff have with the players.
“You’ve just got to focus on yourselves and focus on the controllables, it’s a cliche because it is true and it is true on so many levels,” Abrahams tells The Athletic.
“The will to win can be — not all the time, but it can be — a misnomer. It’s quite paradoxical but if you take a player’s mindset away from ‘win at all costs’ and onto tasks that they have to accomplish then actually you take so much pressure off them. You are more likely to get the desired outcome.
“Teams and individuals can get into trouble when the narrative becomes too much about the strength of the opposition — for example, ‘Chelsea are playing really well, PSG have got Messi etc’ — and the challenges that you face that are out of your control.”
City won in Paris at the end of last season (Photo: Gao Jing/Xinhua via Getty) (Xinhua/Gao Jing via Getty Images)
Some players respond well to the simple motivation of needing to win, although focusing on the “controllables” — the things for which they are responsible — rather than the desired result is encouraged for some players.
Certain City players meditate or visualise upcoming games. Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden, for example, are generally unfazed before matches. Most, if not, all of the squad will have been playing for long enough to have worked out the approach that works for them. City do make use of sports psychology and the message from them and the coaches should, in theory, be the same.
“You have to control the narrative to give yourself the best chance to control the game,” Abrahams says. “It’s about helping every player really immerse themselves in specific details of the game model and the tactical responsibilities.”
Tactical preparation
Now, nobody needs to tell Guardiola to focus on tactical responsibilities. One of the secrets of his success at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City is the tireless work that goes into opposition analysis, which is conducted by the manager and his analysts.
“If you watch four or five old games of the opposition, you’ll know more or less how they will play,” says Domenec Torrent, Guardiola’s former assistant.
“In the end, you reach a conclusion with your staff on how you see it. You tell the players what will happen and you train for it. It’s important not to just tell them why it’s going to happen, you have to replicate it in training.
“It’s as easy as that: watch a lot of games, then work on it in training.”
In the coming days, analysing opposition will not be too much of a problem. The smallest turnaround comes between the Chelsea game on Saturday and the PSG game on Tuesday, but while flying back from London, Guardiola himself will most likely be glued to his laptop watching footage from the game that’s just happened.
It won’t be long before he looks at what has been collated for him regarding PSG so he can formulate a match plan.
The difficulty for the PSG game, in particular, is that replicating the match plan on the training pitch will not be easy because there’s not a lot of time to actually train.
As Guardiola highlighted after the 0-0 draw with Southampton on Saturday, his team had “10 minutes” to prepare for the match. That sounds like an exaggeration but De Bruyne has previously revealed that sometimes City only work on a specific plan for 10-15 minutes on the day of a game, including the double-false-nine system that wreaked havoc at Old Trafford 18 months ago.
So lack of time on the training pitch to work on a match plan is not necessarily a bad thing, especially because the vast majority of the squad have been at City for long enough to know how to do more or less anything Guardiola is going to ask them.
But it is not ideal, especially against such dangerous sides, and the RB Leipzig and Southampton games threw up some interesting things to consider: Guardiola was seen berating Riyad Mahrez, and to a lesser extent Jack Grealish, against the Bundesliga side and it is believed that he had told his wingers to ignore their usual task of blocking passes to the wide men and instead stick close to Leipzig’s central players, as that’s where their attacks come from.
Both players struggled with that and Guardiola was so angry because he knew how important it was that they stick to their jobs for that particular match.
And after the draw with Southampton, when he highlighted City’s sloppy build-up play (due to the Saints’ intelligent pressing), he insisted the best way to put that right was in training, to convince his players to follow his instructions.
He highlighted the training ground as the place to fix those issues rather than by making in-game tweaks because Aymeric Laporte, John Stones, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Rodri — basically all his slickest passers in the defensive third — were injured.
They will need as many of them back as possible for the coming games, and there was good news on Thursday as Stones, Laporte and Rodri returned to training.
Physical preparation
Monday is regarded as a “dangerous” day, according to an expert in the field, because players need anywhere between 24 hours and 72 hours to recover, and as next week begins, City’s players will be still recovering from the Chelsea game but need to prepare for PSG at the same time. Tuesday, however, is regarded as the most valuable time for match preparation because the players will — or should — be fresher, and will be ready to focus on the game that night, having forgotten about the Chelsea game.
The day after matches, only unused substitutes and young players will do much work on the grass, and even two days after a game there will be a light session. This weekend there will be a recovery session on Sunday, a light session on Monday morning before flying to Paris with a focus on tactical work, although match preparation can be left until the day of the game itself.
This is common in football, of course, and teams make plans for these more testing parts of the season according to the principles of periodisation. In short, seasons are split into light, medium and heavy load days and coaches will adapt their sessions — in terms of recovery, technical work, tactical work, fitness work — to ensure that players do not get overloaded, or even underloaded.
In the coming 10 days or so, City’s “heavy” days will be the matches themselves, so training days will be light and medium, with days off as well. That’s what load management is and it’s how clubs and coaches try to ensure players recover well enough to be able to contribute at a high level over the course of a season.
It might be expected that City would immediately switch focus to Chelsea after the win against Wycombe, but the players were given a day off on Wednesday and that’s likely to be the case next Thursday, in the lead-up to the Liverpool game. Those who play less than 45 minutes will do a light session in Paris on Wednesday morning (to top up their load, to ensure the right balance) while the rest recover. After a day off, they will be back in on Friday and Saturday to go over the match plan for Liverpool as well as anything relevant from Tuesday’s match.
These kinds of considerations are why De Bruyne and Foden started against Wycombe and not against Southampton last weekend. The layperson would probably suggest that they would have been better off playing in the more important Premier League game, but the more relaxed nature of a cup tie against a League One side is judged as better for their overall fitness, so they are in better shape heading into the upcoming run of games. It is just one element of Guardiola’s team selections.
“Everything starts with the main goal,” the industry insider says. “The main goal for the 10 days around Chelsea and Liverpool is to keep the players fresh.
“Once we have the goal established, we work out what are the means and methods we can use to keep the players fresh, and the first thing is sleep. Sleep and nutrition are the most important.”
It’s common for players to monitor their sleep patterns using apps so they will know what works and what doesn’t, but power naps, especially on planes, will be important over the next week.
City won at Anfield last season for the first time since 2003 (Photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
Some City players sleep in hyperbaric chambers, where they breathe in almost pure oxygen, for a couple of hours, use blackout masks on transport, and sleep on tailored pillows in temperature-controlled rooms while on away trips, with everything designed to boost quality of the sleep to aid the recovery of the muscles.
Deep sleep helps release hormones to help the body recover, so a poor night’s sleep does heighten the chance of soft-tissue injuries or simply poorer performances. So the classic “fireworks outside the hotel room” prank can be very effective, although City still beat Borussia Dortmund when it happened to them in Germany earlier this year.
Away games make everything harder due to reduced access to facilities and nutrition, although by now clubs have found ways to manage. At the Etihad Campus, players have access to a cryogenic chamber and different water treatments. Compression garments can be used in hotel rooms to help muscle recovery, too.
One of the things that those around City say makes a difference is the sheer number of staff employed in these player care departments. There are two people, for example, who work on the club’s swimming pool.
Nutrition plans are drawn up depending on which kind of activities players are preparing for or recovering from. That’s why days such as Monday can be tricky, as food that is used to boost recovery — things with anti-inflammatory qualities, like berries, peppers and turmeric — start to make way for more energy- and micronutrient-rich snacks, like fruit, dark chocolate and kale, for energy. Smoothies are an easy way to get it all in and City have chefs on the team bus after away games.
Hydration is also important, with City players weighed before and after the match to see how much water they lose through sweat, so it can be swiftly topped back up afterwards.
A run of three away very tough matches, particularly with little turnaround time between Chelsea and PSG, does make things harder as the travelling for a match itself increases the load on players both mentally and physically, because of the logistics, reduced time to recovery, less ideal sleeping conditions and various other complexities.
However, these three big games are not necessarily more physically demanding than the type of games City face in October, against Burnley, Club Bruges and Brighton.
“If you look up the numbers it’s the same, but your mind drives everything,” the source says. “The pressure during these games is different, when you play against Chelsea compared to when you play against a lesser team. The atmosphere, the pressure, all these things change the player’s perception and the result is more stress.
“You can run the same distance or do the same number of sprints but the perception will be different. That’s why the main goal is not only to keep the body fresh, but the mind too. Some teams already do meditation, breathing work and visualisation with their players. It’s really important when you think about what you can do to keep your mind really fresh and how you handle this kind of pressure.”
The opposition
Although Mahrez and Grealish were chided for not following Guardiola’s match plan, leading to tactical problems for the team, there are no guarantees that the manager’s plans will always be right in the first place.
Guardiola’s usually are, but against Chelsea in the Champions League final, City’s set-up seemed to hinder them, and not just because of the lack of a holding midfielder — which is said to have baffled some players in the days before the game in Porto.
City’s front three on the night pressed Chelsea’s back three, meaning the full-backs had to engage the Londoners’ wing-backs. That left City’s two centre-backs exposed to runs from midfield and Timo Werner. That was also a problem for a much-changed City team when Tuchel’s men advanced to the FA Cup final, and in between those matches, another rotated City team somehow lost at the Etihad from a goal up.
Guardiola and his squad are more than capable of putting things right this weekend but it will be interesting to see how they go about the game given last season’s struggles, particularly if they are missing several of their better ball-players.
The Liverpool game is sure to be fascinating, too, given each side has inflicted heavy defeats on the other during Guardiola and Klopp’s time in charge.
City got their first win at Anfield since 2003 last season, forcing and exploiting errors from Allison in a 4-1 rout, although Guardiola himself threw forward to this season and the return of fans on Merseyside.
Manchester City season preview
Guardiola will have specific instructions for each game (Photo: Matt McNulty – Manchester City/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
“Hopefully, next time we can do it with a similar performance with spectators as Anfield with and without (fans) is completely different,” he said.
Klopp’s men can press high or drop off, and they are experts at forcing errors when playing the ball out from defence into midfield, similarly to how Southampton did last weekend. Guardiola will be working out how to avoid that while finding a way for his players to force Liverpool into the same errors, like last season.
In the middle of those games, of course, is a reunion with Messi. The Argentinian is not the same player as he was in 2015, nor are PSG as dangerous as the Barcelona team back then, but Guardiola took his Bayern Munich side to the Nou Camp with a high-risk, high-line, man-marking approach and it will be fascinating to see what plans he has for Messi, or whether he feels he needs any at all. And then there’s Neymar, Mbappe and all the less heralded but no less important midfielders and defenders.
Plenty to think about over the next week or so.
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