Manchester City’s Community Shield Disappointment: Maresca's Gamble
Manchester City’s Community Shield display did not just disappoint. It jarred with almost everything Enzo Maresca has spent the summer preaching.
After a pre-season that felt carefully plotted, particularly on the Asia tour, City arrived at Wembley looking oddly scrambled. The patterns that had begun to emerge in July vanished. The decisions from the dugout only deepened the sense of confusion.
Yes, Arsenal were the best side City have faced under Maresca so far. Yes, it is still August. But this was a team that suddenly looked far less than the sum of its expensive, carefully assembled parts – even with four of their biggest names rushed back into the XI straight off their holidays.
Maresca’s selection gamble
Erling Haaland, Elliot Anderson, Nico O’Reilly and Jeremy Doku all started despite having only a handful of training sessions behind them. On paper, that looked like a manager going all-in for his first piece of silverware in charge. Why else throw them straight back in when fitter, more tactically drilled options were available?
Maresca’s explanation after the game cut against that assumption. This was not about the Shield. It was about Bournemouth and the opening stretch of the Premier League.
“Sometimes players prefer to start doing the proper warm up and start from the beginning,” he said. The plan, he explained, had always been to hook them after 45 to 60 minutes. In his mind, starting them was the quickest route to having them ready for competitive action next weekend, not a show of win-at-all-costs intent against Arsenal.
The logic might work over a month. On the day, it hurt.
Anderson out of position, Kovacic exposed
No one felt it more than Anderson. Only days earlier, Maresca had been crystal clear: the former Nottingham Forest midfielder is a No.6 or a No.8. At Wembley, he was shunted to an awkward floating role off the right, a halfway house that suited neither him nor the structure behind him.
There were flashes. Two excellent balls into the box, one each for Haaland and Doku, hinted at his attacking quality. But City’s midfield shape buckled. With Anderson roaming and O’Reilly also finding his feet, Mateo Kovacic was left marooned as the lone holding midfielder, repeatedly swamped as Arsenal flooded central areas.
The selection on the right only raised more eyebrows because of who was missing. Matheus Nunes, talked up all summer as the club’s first-choice right-back and backed so firmly that plans to sign competition have been shelved, did not start. In his place, Abdukodir Khusanov endured a rough afternoon, exposed alongside a back line that never looked settled.
Those two calls – Anderson out of position and Nunes on the sidelines – made a difficult assignment against Arsenal considerably harder. They also cut across the clarity Maresca had shown in pre-season about roles and structure.
A surprise return for Grealish
Then came the other curveball. Jack Grealish, back from a loan at Everton and absent from the summer tour with City prepared to move him on, emerged for the second half.
On pure football logic, those minutes might have been more useful for Rayan Ait-Nouri as he beds into the system. On transfer logic, they made sense. Any club monitoring a £100m winger will have welcomed the sight of Grealish looking sharp and involved under the Wembley arch. If City want to cash in, this was a useful shop window.
It all added to the sense that Maresca was juggling short-term preparation, medium-term squad planning and the long-term identity of his new City side in one messy 90-minute bundle.
Flunked test, or a one-off?
As a first major examination, this was a fail. City were second best, disjointed and reactive. The questions came quickly: can Maresca impose his ideas on a dressing room used to Pep Guardiola’s perfectionism? Will those ideas be strong enough to keep City at the top of the Premier League and competitive in the Champions League?
Yet the very strangeness of some of his choices hints that this might not be the template. The manager who spent the summer drilling Anderson as a central midfielder is unlikely to leave him drifting on the right for long. The coach who has backed Nunes as his starting right-back will not want Khusanov learning the role under fire every week.
With Anderson restored to a more natural role and Nunes reinforcing the defence, City should look closer to the side that impressed in patches on tour rather than the one that laboured against Arsenal.
The temptation after a high-profile defeat is to pronounce verdicts. Maresca’s City, written off after one showpiece, Guardiola’s shadow looming over every misplaced pass. The reality is duller, and more important: these 90 minutes, ugly as they were, will not tell the whole story of what this team becomes.
The real judgment starts when the Premier League whistle blows at Bournemouth.
