Early on this season, I made a ridiculous bet that City would be reeled in by the other teams in early February because by late November I noticed that as he was absolutely dominating the league, Guardiola was barely rotating his team. His starters were racking up more minutes than starters at other teams. I found it unusual for him to just keep pounding through the autumn with a team in peak conditioning from Summer to Christmas, especially without the prospect of a winter break. Here they are now, at 100 goals faster than any team in the last 90 years.
Part of my delusions was driven by this idea that you must rotate. What Guardiola knows is that there are costs and benefits related to rotation. The benefit is the diminished risk of injury. The cost of course is that teams do not gel. Nor do you get to play your absolute best players all the time. And you look at our team that has been rotated ruthlessly all season long. Absolutely no chemistry to speak of. And we do it again.
I think the injury excuse is overplayed. It’s not like sending players out is a guarantee of injury. There is probably a 1 in 10 chance we suffer a meaningful injury in any given game. People talk about it like it’s a 50/50 occurence - every other game an important player gets injured and is out.
What we had was a chance to do 2 things. First, to play our last game at United with pride and hopefully beat this wretched rival. Second, to continue to get this team to gel ahead of the important second leg with Atletico. Instead we will achieve neither. We will probably get beaten. Fans will be glum. And we will head into the Atletico game on the back of two wretched games
