It took Manchester City seven games to look like the team best placed to chase down Arsenal at the top of the Premier League this season. It has taken them three more to put that entire conversation on hold, and to drag up a comparison that nobody at the Etihad will have been hoping to hear.
Enzo Maresca's side won their opening seven league fixtures, then lost to Aston Villa, Brighton and, most recently, Nottingham Forest, beaten 3-1 at the City Ground on 7 November courtesy of two goals from former City striker Liam Delap. It left City third in the table on 21 points, six behind leaders Arsenal, beaten by a Forest side that had started the afternoon in the relegation zone. More immediately, the game cost City two defenders. Marc Guehi and Josko Gvardiol were both withdrawn at half time, and Guehi has since pulled out of England's squad altogether, with Newcastle's Dan Burn called up in his place for the Nations League double header against Croatia and Spain.
A record that has stood since 1904
Winning your opening seven top flight matches and then losing your next three sounds like the kind of slump that must have happened before somewhere in well over a century of English league football. It has not, not quite. The only side previously to manage that exact sequence is Sheffield Wednesday, in the 1904-05 season, when English football looked almost unrecognisable from the game City are trying to get a grip on now.
Wednesday won seven of their opening ten fixtures that season, including a run in which they beat Blackburn Rovers, Nottingham Forest and Stoke without conceding a goal, before losing three straight: 3-0 to Sunderland, 3-0 to Woolwich Arsenal, and 1-0 to Derby County. They eventually finished ninth in an 18 team division, a solidly mid-table campaign rather than a crisis, but the warning for City is obvious. A flying start guarantees nothing about where a season ends up, and City's own players are not pretending otherwise.
"I'm always concerned, even when we win games," Maresca said after the Forest defeat, a reminder that his caution through City's early-season form was not simply coachspeak. "We need to have balance. We won seven in a row. Now we have lost three in a row, so we need balance on that." He stopped short of calling it a crisis, but he did not pretend three defeats from three was anything other than a problem that needs solving quickly, rather than waited out.
Two injuries that followed City into the break
The more pressing issue for Maresca, though, is who he has available when the Premier League resumes. Guehi went off at half time at the City Ground with what Maresca described simply as "an injury," without giving further detail, and the player withdrew from Thomas Tuchel's England squad on the Monday after the game. Burn, Newcastle's captain, was called up in his place, leaving Guehi's recovery timeline as one of several English injury stories to emerge from this international break, and his fitness for City's return now genuinely in doubt.
Gvardiol's situation is a little less alarming on the face of it. He too was substituted at half time against Forest, but Maresca put that down to a pre-existing issue rather than anything new, saying the defender "had some issue already during the week, so it was just because they had problems." Unlike Guehi, Gvardiol has not withdrawn from international duty, staying with Croatia for their own Nations League fixtures this month, which at least suggests his own camp is not treating it as serious. Even so, losing two first choice defenders to injury concerns in the same half of football, in the middle of a losing run, is not the kind of international break City would have scripted for themselves.
Why the next month matters more than the last one
City are back in Premier League action at Fulham on 21 November, then away at Arsenal eight days later, two fixtures that will tell Maresca far more about his team's true level than the seven game winning run that opened the season ever could. Win both and the Sheffield Wednesday comparison becomes a trivia footnote. Lose either, with Guehi and Gvardiol's fitness still uncertain, and the conversation around City shifts from a blip to something more serious.
All of this is also playing out against a backdrop City cannot simply coach their way past. The club's financial rules case, in which 114 of 115 charges were upheld by an independent commission in late September, remains unresolved, with the Premier League's regulator saying City's appeal is expected to be heard by January. It is not something that affects team selection at Fulham, but it is the context in which every stumble this season gets read, fairly or not, by a watching football world.
For now, Maresca's message is the same one he gave his players the moment the final whistle went at the City Ground: use the international break to work out what has gone wrong, rather than panic about it. "During the international break, try to understand what we can do better," he said. "We know we do some things better, and also we know we need to improve things." Whether that review leaves Guehi and Gvardiol fit enough to start again at Fulham may end up mattering just as much as anything Maresca identifies on the training ground.
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