Manchester City – a new low

Well, technically a new high.

A picture paints a thousand words, or 447 numbers, anyway. We don’t have any great affinity for Chelsea but a 5-1 win was the least they deserved after Manchester City committed this offence.

A mean average number of just over 40.5, and a median of 51. Adding insult to injury is the fact two of three 1-11 numbers are grossly out of place – the right- and left-backs wearing 5 and 11 respectively. Of the numbers from 31-47, City have only allocated 42 (Yaya Toure), so this could have been made slightly less worse.

Not much else to say, other than to hope that the FA might insist that teams go back to 1-11 rather than us having to put up with this shit.

1-11 in the Premier League redux, Part 3

You know the drill by this stage, we’re examining how the Premier League teams would look if they picked the players numbered 1-11. Next up, the middle four alphabetically:

Liverpool

1. Brad Jones
2. Glen Johnson
3. José Enrique
4. Kolo Touré
5. –
6. Dejan Lovren
7. –
8. Steven Gerrard
9. Rickie Lambert
10. Philippe Coutinho
11. Oussama Assaidi

No numbers 5 or 7, but the way the rest of the players are allows us to put those numbers in historically appropriate locations for Liverpool (4-4-2 might have been better but Brendan Rodgers does tend to prefere 4-2-3-1 and the number 7 often played just off 9 in the great ‘Pool teams).

Switch 2 with 4 and 8 with 11 and it’s like Kenny Dalglish assigned the numbers.

Manchester City

1. Joe Hart
2. Micah Richards
3. Bacary Sagna
4. Vincent Kompany
5. Pablo Zabaleta
6. Fernando
7. James Milner
8. Samir Nasri
9. Alvaro Negredo
10. Edin Dzeko
11. Aleksandar Kolarov

We could have gone 4-4-2, with Sagna at right-back, Zabaleta left-back and Kolarov on the wing, but Kolarov is more of a defender, though two right-backs in a back three distorts the balance slightly.

Manchester United

1. David de Gea
2. Rafael
3. Luke Shaw
4. Phil Jones
5. Marcos Rojo
6. Jonny Evans
7. Angel di Maria
8. Juan Mata
9. Radamel Falcao
10. Wayne Rooney
11. Adnan Januzaj

Pretty perfect numbering for this formation (apart from 5 and 6 the wrong way round), though if United were to ever line up like this it could be 6-5. You’d need a couple of good defenders and mid-2000s Michael Essien instead of Jones.

Could have gone with three at the back but then there’d be no midfield at all. W-M, perhaps?

Newcastle United

1. Tim Krul
2. Fabricio Coloccini
3. Davide Santon
4. Ryan Taylor
5. –
6. Mike Williamson
7. Moussa Sissoko
8. Vurnon Anita
9. Papiss Demba Cissé
10. Siem de Jong
11. Yoan Gouffran

The lack of a 5 is a help in terms of making a playable formation, and while it’s not the ideal place to put it, Ruel Fox did wear that number while playing as a winger for the Toon. Coloccini likes 2 as he’s Argentinean and luckily the others fall into that system.