One day last week, Jack Grealish stole into a picture of Manchester City’s five captains after Rodri told him to take Kevin De Bruyne’s place while they waited for the Belgian.
Grealish being Grealish, he happily smirked his way through the photo call. De Bruyne eventually turned up to take his rightful place and will do so again when he returns from injury, months from now.
It wasn’t until Saturday that the reality of how much City miss him hit home. Forgetting De Bruyne has been relatively easy as Pep Guardiola’s side won every week, but they needed him at Molineux. Badly.
And they will yearn for the Premier League’s finest midfielder on plenty more occasions until his hamstring problem clears up, probably in the new year. He has that indefinable ability to take games away from stubborn opponents. De Bruyne does things that alter the course of matches in a way nobody else can.
Watching wave after wave of fairly ponderous attacks, it was easy to imagine De Bruyne taking a ball 30 yards from goal, pinging it over the top for Erling Haaland and City breaking Wolves’ resistance in an instant. De Bruyne has always given Guardiola’s men a gear change.
Manchester CIty failed to find a cutting edge in their 2-1 defeat by Wolves on Saturday
The Premier League title holders missed the influential Kevin De Bruyne, who is out with a hamstring injury
Pep Guardiola, who was banned from the touchline at Molineux, was also without the suspended Rodri in midfield
He is not there to win every game for them like Haaland; he is there to win clunky, bitty, weary ones just like this. Rodri’s absence presented a problem, too. Wolves broke so easily, highlighting what a huge figure the Spaniard is for City these days.
But a fit De Bruyne with a working radar would surely have won this game for City and those are the fine margins in a title race that is shaping up nicely.
Nonetheless, Wolves were superb. Craig Dawson and Max Kilman shepherded Haaland masterfully, reducing the Norwegian to 15 touches. And it was the sort of blood and thunder day — with vitriol hurled at the recently departed Matheus Nunes provoking an improved Wolves display — that can inject life into Gary O’Neil’s tenure.
‘The criticism (of O’Neil) has definitely been unfair,’ said Kilman. ‘People can’t see behind the scenes and the amount of work him and his team are doing, how they’re setting us up tactically.
‘The quality of training has been phenomenal and it was a matter of time before we started picking up results. Gary got it spot on here. We want to learn from a top coach.
‘This match was unbelievable from start to finish. With Haaland, you know he’s one of the best in the world. We had to be on it.’
And they were. O’Neil stuck Matheus Cunha on Mateo Kovacic, filling in for Rodri as the No 6, and Wolves let Ruben Dias have the ball all afternoon. Dias didn’t do an awful lot with it, to Guardiola’s frustration in the stands as he served a one-match touchline ban. He seems to think he will be there a few more times as well under the new laws.
‘It’s not a big issue, it’s not a problem, they made the rules,’ said the City boss. ‘When I was at Barcelona, I was the least physical player ever, but maybe I was one of the most booked players. Always because I talk and talk and talk. As a manager it is the same. I say something if I think it’s an injustice or something I don’t like. I have to control it.
‘When you see things you don’t like, then I will say. I’d like to control (myself) but I cannot assure you 100 per cent that I will.’
Wolves secured the sort of blood and thunder victory that could inject life into manager Gary O’Neil’s tenure
A superb defensive display limited Premier League top scorer Erling Haaland to just 15 touches throughout the 90 minutes
Then came a measured swipe at the league’s officiating, more in the tone of delivery than the content. City and Wolves were both aghast at Craig Pawson’s refereeing. ‘We know each other quite well,’ Guardiola added. ‘They know me but I know them, that’s for sure.’
City seemed to be affected by Guardiola’s absence from the technical area but more pertinent was Wolves’ game plan, and midfielder Pedro Neto was key — doing all the work himself for the first goal when racing free of Nathan Ake.
‘I should have stopped the counter-attacks,’ Ake rued. ‘I could have done much better on a few occasions. I will definitely look at myself before anyone else. We have to recover before Leipzig (on Wednesday) and Arsenal.
‘We are hard on ourselves but we know nothing is going to change now. It’s happened. The only thing we can do is focus on the next one.
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