Manchester City Show Fighting Spirit in Rough-and-Tumble Win at Burnley

It’s often a said that a team that likes to play attractive and free-flowing football shouldn’t be judged on their performances when they’ve been allowed to break through opposition lines willy-nilly and score three, four, five goals in a dominating win. It’s when they come up against the blood-and-thunder style—that in-your-face attitude that involves a lot of hard challenges, yellow cards and players left in a heap—that they show what they’re made of.

Title-challengers find a way to win, even if it’s not pretty. On Saturday lunchtime, without particularly playing well, Manchester City left Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium with all three points. They’d had to fight for them in what was a cauldron atmosphere, but Pep Guardiola’s side deal with that sort of thing much better these days.

It was a match, in many regards, that was similar to City’s last visit—a 1-0 defeat in March 2015, during a slump in form under former boss Manuel Pellegrini. The visitors weren’t able to carve out a lot of chances, despite having the majority of possession, and the home side took the lead by finishing off from a loose ball on the edge of the box.

Crucially, though, the difference in City’s performance was their willingness to fight. In the three years under Pellegrini, having often been able to cope with the rough-and-tumble during his predecessor Roberto Mancini’s reign, City developed a soft underbelly. When the going got tough, they went hiding and lost.

While the performances haven’t been brilliant in recent weeks for Guardiola, the City fans can take solace in the knowledge that their team is slowly regaining their ability to win difficult matches—Saturday’s 2-1 victory at Turf Moor is another classic example this season.

Burnley started the better. City’s defence, still yet to look solid this campaign, was under intense pressure, and it had the feel of “one of those days.” The visitors couldn’t move the ball more than two or three passes without giving up possession, while the hosts were causing all sorts of problems by putting it in the air and into the box.

When Dean Marney opened the scoring inside 14 minutes, the phrase running through most City fans’ heads was “here we go again”. The defence could have done better—a long punt from Paul Robinson was only half dealt with by Nicolas Otamedni, and Marney was loitering on the edge of the box to finish past Claudio Bravo.

This is where previously City would have buckled. On an afternoon where they needed to show some fight to get back into the game—against a team that was kicking everything that moved and being roared on by a crowd like one you’d expect in a Roman amphitheatre baying for the blood of a gladiator—the visitors rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. The fans, perhaps damaged by 18 months of limp responses, need to trust that the club can do that again.

By half-time, Pep Guardiola’s side had begun to move the ball quickly and dangerously. Where they couldn’t string two passes together in the opening minutes, then ended the first period largely camped inside the Burnley half—searching for the opening to get a decent shooting chance, occasionally not taking it too.

Raheem Sterling should have shot when played through into the area by Yaya Toure—he kept waiting for support to deliver a pull-back, which was strange given his previous displays of confidence in front of goal this season. Toure himself had missed the target from inside the box, while Sergio Aguero found the veteran Robinson in good form to flick an effort around the post.

OLI SCARFF/Getty Images

However, two goals either side of half-time from the Argentinian were enough to ease City into the lead and to an eventual victory. If there was anything that summed up the scrappy nature of the game, it was those efforts—the first was a toe poke after a scramble in the box; the second bounced off his knee after a bigger and far more entertaining goalmouth scramble.

Anyone who claims to prefer pretty passing, with swift one-twos, cute reverse balls and intelligent running over a good ol’ spell of panic in the area is lying. There’s nothing better than watching two defenders tackle each other in an attempt to clear a ball that’s been stuck on the penalty spot for far longer than anyone is comfortable with—unless it’s your own team defending like that, of course.

Those goals mean Aguero has now scored against all but one of the opposition teams he’s ever faced in the Premier League—only Bolton Wanderers managed to escape conceding to the Argentinian before they slipped out of the top flight in his debut year in Manchester.

The centre-forward is also the Premier League’s leading scoring in the 2016 calendar year, bagging 27 in 29 games. For a man who’s considered to be playing some way off the top of his game by so many, his record is frightening, and he has averaged nearly a goal a match for City in his last 34 top-flight appearances.

City have also now won six of their seven Premier League away matches this season. In all of the narrative suggesting that the club hasn’t been playing well recently and how they were troubled by a spirited Burnley side—an argument that has a little merit, in fairness—it’s being forgotten that Guardiola hasn’t been upset by what's considered the usual tough away days.

The Catalan has won 4-1 at Stoke City, 2-1 at Crystal Palace and now 2-1 at Burnley in front of baying crowds. While everybody is focusing on whether he’s been able to achieve his objective of getting City playing his own special brand of football, it’s being missed that he’s quietly solving the soft-underbelly problem.

City represents Guardiola’s biggest challenge as a manager. When he took charge of both Barcelona and Bayern Munich, he transformed them into two of the world’s best—however, he was starting from a much better standard than he is in Manchester.

He was never going to be able to create a team that blew the Premier League away simply by arriving in the dugout, but what he has done is begin to impose his methods and ideology onto the side, while also toughening them up.

Alex Livesey/Getty Images

The up-and-at-‘em English football mentality doesn’t matter to him, and as his goalkeeper controlled the ball and played it around to his defenders while under pressure once more on Saturday lunchtime, Guardiola showed he wasn’t going to be intimidated by his players being given the rough treatment, either.

Sterling, once again, was the main target. He was bizarrely booed by the home fans—presumably for leaving one club that has no connection to Burnley for another one that doesn’t—and subjected to chants of “you let your country down,” despite not being the only poor performer of Euro 2016. The same won't be said of any of the other England players that visit Turf Moor, making the criticism of the City winger somewhat odd.

Despite all of that, though, City didn’t wilt in the hostile atmosphere.

Following the victory at Turf Moor, there will be plenty of stories about City’s performance being unconvincing or below par. That is true, of course—it wasn’t the display the fans or the manager would have been hoping for—but that thinking is short-term. In the grand scheme of things, there are clear signs of improvement and of what Guardiola is hoping to achieve with his latest club over time.

Rome wasn't built in a day. And City won't be Guardiola's City in just a couple of months.