City's Left Side Is Not Working
Dean Stephen and Nahuel Pelayes have been trusted together on Manchester City's left, and the numbers say the trust is misplaced.
Six games together, one goal a game, three defeats. A team that scores three a game and wins every time one of them stands aside. Whatever the left flank of Stephen and Pelayes is meant to be, it is not working.
The pair are thirty-one now, settled men with long service behind them — Stephen a one-club man since the youth intake, Pelayes past his fourth year at the club after that £130.0m move from Chelsea. You can see what the idea is. You cannot see the goals. In those six matches City have mustered a single goal a game and lost half of them; in the three without one of the pair they have rattled in 3.3 and conceded the same 0.7. "We know what this team looks like when it flows," one voice around the place said this week. "It has not flowed down that side." The season is young enough to fix. The table, though, does not wait.