Instead of panicking, Zakaria escaped with a couple of neat touches, then calmly hit a crossfield pass to break the press 🔥
We’ve just written about Denis Zakaria’s impressive showing tonight against Man City, and it was capped off with a lovely moment at the end.
City players were pressing high, trying to double their advantage, and three of them swarmed Zakaria in his own half. Instead of panicking, he escaped with a couple of neat touches, then calmly hit a crossfield pass to break the press.
But there was more to his performance tonight than just flicks and tricks. He moved the ball well, he covered the width of the pitch, and he drove the team forward at times.
You can see his impressive skills in the clip embedded here:
A nice bit of craft, there’s no doubt, but this ball he sprays wide (and, critically, up the field) was more the exception than the rule. To my eyes, an awful lot of Zakaria’s passes on the night were horizontal or backward and lacked incisiveness.
Although we didn’t play altogether badly against a very strong City team, Zakaria (and, really, most of the squad) lacked the imagination and aggressiveness in possession to put City under real pressure. I thought it was particularly telling that, even in the dying minutes, we seemed far too content to knock the ball side-to-side or backwards (with no real tempo) and failed to create any danger in the box even as time expired. Our one best chance late on came from Hall but he opted to go for glory (with a 1 in 100 shot blasted over at the near post) instead of playing the percentages and ripping a low, hard ball across the goal mouth with City defenders in retreat and facing their own net.
Alas, these patterns of all-too-slow, all-too-unimaginative play in the final third pre-date Potter, but it’s hard to see how Zakaria can be part of the solution unless he possesses A LOT more of the wizardry displayed in this clip. Color me hopeful but not yet convinced that he does.