What is a defender? One of the more lasting legacies of Pep Guardiola’s extraordinary coaching career has been to deconstruct this fundamental football term. Must a defender make tackles and blocks? Do they, by definition, spend more time in their own half? Can we at least agree that the emphasis of the position is tilted more towards preventing goals than creating them? One by one, Guardiola’s teams and their brilliant but unorthodox defenders have toppled these preconceptions like dominoes. “A Pep defender is never just a defender,” his Bayern Munich alumnus Jan Kirchhoff told me last year.
This strange and brilliant match probably will not have too many resounding repercussions. Manchester City are unlikely to be knocked off their stride towards the title. Leeds United were magnificent, but they were safe anyway, and it is not like the Marcelo Bielsa project needs additional validation, is it? But I wonder if we might look back on this as the day that Guardiola’s vision of the anti-defender found its final and most fully realised form.
These are the facts of John Stones’s performance. He took four shots. He completed 65 passes in the opposition half, more than any other player on the pitch. From the 55th minute to the 90th, he did not have a single involvement behind the centre circle. This was not some wild, kamikaze display by an incorrigible loose cannon. It was a new frontier in the history of the centre back.
It is worth reminding ourselves just how quickly the game has evolved. In the 2009-10 season, the Premier League centre back who played the most passes in the opposition half was Ricardo Carvalho, with 17.7 per 90 minutes. This season Stones is averaging a shade over 32. Here, he more than doubled that.
Naturally, the context of the match, or what football analysts like to call “game state”, was a big factor in shaping Stones’s performance. Leeds were protecting a 1-0 lead with a numerical disadvantage for much of the game. Liam Cooper’s red card meant that Patrick Bamford, the centre forward who would ordinarily lead the press and be responsible for pressurising City’s centre backs, was withdrawn. With Leeds retreating into an organised low block, Stones was able to waltz beyond the halfway line with relative ease. In that context, you could argue there was nothing too impressive about racking up passes in the Leeds half.
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Two things marked out Stones’s performance as truly extraordinary, though. The first was his dribbling. He was not just stepping into the middle third of the pitch under little pressure. On several occasions, he surged deep into the Leeds half, right up to the penalty area, wriggling into pockets of space, dodging tackles, like an elegant salmon evading bear-claw swipes on the upstream run. Three times he took on and beat a Leeds defender in the central area between the centre circle and the “D”.
According to the football analytics expert Tom Worville, Stones carried the ball 698 metres in the attacking half, a full 111m more than any other player has managed in any Premier League game this season. The player he overtook at the top of that particular leaderboard was Jack Grealish.
The other remarkable aspect of Stones’s display was the intent of his passing. For a centre back to forge so deep and simply lay the ball off to a team-mate would be one thing. But time after time, Stones backed himself to take the most progressive option: 55 of the 88 passes he attempted were forwards, and he completed 53 of them. The trendy buzzword here is “verticality”. Look at Stones’s pass map and you can see how he eschewed safe lateral balls in favour of the sort of direct, dagger-like passes that puncture the lines of a set defence and take defenders out of the game.
In the end, of course, City lost this game. Stones did not make a single tackle in the match — including, conspicuously, in the 91st minute when Stuart Dallas got in behind him to stroke the winner through Ederson’s legs. So was he derelict in his primary duty? That would be harsh. City were trying to win the game, and Guardiola’s system requires defenders to cover an awful lot of space. Stones was in a good position as the Leeds counter unfurled; it was his centre-back partner, Fernandinho, who was caught upfield, leaving a hole for Dallas to run into. Had the final ball from Ezgjan Alioski been anything less than perfect, Stones would probably have cut it out.
In Stones, Gareth Southgate has a unique chess piece at his disposal, and most importantly, a player on a high. After the careworn, fretful displays of the last couple of seasons, when Stones looked spooked by the fear of making a mistake, this was the absolute opposite: a player thrust by supreme confidence in his ability to new and daring heights.
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The task for the Leeds centre backs could hardly have been more different, but Diego Llorente had another excellent game at the heart of their defence. It has been a difficult season for Llorente, who signed from Real Sociedad last summer, with groin and hamstring injuries having severely restricted his involvement. But this was his seventh start in a row and, with three successive 2-1 wins following the 0-0 against Chelsea, he has been the bedrock of Leeds’s most consistent run of form of the season.
Manchester City (4-3-3): Ederson 6 — J Cancelo 7, J Stones 9, N Aké 6 (I Gündogan 58min, 7), B Mendy 6 (P Foden 74) — B Silva 6, Fernandinho 5, O Zinchenko 8 — F Torres 8, G Jesus 6, R Sterling 6. Booked Aké, Silva, Fernandinho.
Leeds United (4-1-4-1): I Meslier 7 — L Ayling 7, D Llorente 8, L Cooper 5, E Alioski 8 — K Phillips 8 — Raphinha 8 (J Shackleton 90+6), S Dallas 9, T Roberts 6 (R Koch 63, 7), H Costa 8 — P Bamford 6 (P Struijk 45+3, 7). Booked Alioski. Sent off Cooper.
Referee A Marriner.