City and Donnarumma on the ball

I was in the pub when the chat started going round and one of the lads said City were basically building a safety net for Donnarumma and everyone at the table just laughed because it sounded like something you would make up after a few pints, but then you read the report and it is actually real and that makes it even funnier, proper football nerd stuff, because now people are discussing whether three defenders in the build up is enough to hide the fact that the keeper does not want to be doing anything too fancy with the ball, and I am sat there thinking this is exactly the sort of nonsense that turns a normal Tuesday into a full debate about systems and profiles and whether Trafford should have stayed and all that, football is mad sometimes
 
It is a reasonable adjustment if the goal is to reduce risk in the first phase and keep Donnarumma comfortable on the ball. But it also suggests City are having to work around the issue more than they maybe expected imo
 
I do not buy the idea that this proves the signing was a mistake because teams adapt to players all the time and City are obviously trying to protect the structure rather than expose it, people are just using the story to make it sound worse than it is and acting like every keeper must be a mini midfielder now which is a bit ridiculous, the issue is not that Donnarumma exists, it is that everyone wants the same profile and then acts shocked when a different one needs some help
 
A measured point here is that City are simply trying to maximise a goalkeeper they rate highly while limiting the risk in possession, which is a perfectly normal thing for a top side to do. The funny part is how quickly these conversations turn into philosophy lectures about the death of the traditional keeper, as if every club now needs a goalkeeper who can also play as a deep-lying eight, and once that starts the thread always ends up in the same place with people pretending one tweak to the build up is either genius or proof the signing was doomed. In reality it is probably just a bit of both the club recognising a limitation and trying to engineer around it, but football discourse cannot leave anything alone for five minutes and now we are talking about keeper distribution like it is the final piece of the tactical puzzle when half the time the whole thing just comes down to whether the pass is clean or whether everyone starts screaming at once
 
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