By Gethin Thurlow (20/04/2025)
Above: Manchester City manager Nick Cushing. Photo: @ManCityWomen on X
Manchester City took the decision to let go of Gareth Taylor five days before a League Cup final. Facing a quadruple of matches against Chelsea, City reintroduced Nick Cushing as head coach – with the aim of trying to secure Champions League football next year. So, after this first block of games – was it the right call? What has Cushing changed in his first months in charge?
Just to preface this, there’s a few reasons why these are hard questions to answer. Firstly, given the nature of the midweek games, Cushing has never had more than three or four days between each match with the players and therefore has not been able to implement a completely new style of play, but there are some subtle differences.
Also, four games against a dominant Chelsea side is a signficantly harder stretch than Taylor oversaw and thus the team won’t have been able to show it’s full abilities like it has many times this year against easier opposition. Cushing has also encountered a major injury crisis and as such the team will naturally have played differently in these few weeks as the start of the season with Taylor.
The idea of this is quite ironic because Cushing was apppointed because of his background within the City Group (a global network of clubs owned by the owners of Manchester City) and his knowledge of the ‘City way’ of playing. This is quite a rigid tatctical setup based on controlling the ball, building up slowly and attacking with the entire team.
It was felt that someone who had managed this club using this style would be best to takeover so that the transition was managable for the squad with a very short turnaround time – keeping in mind that the squad had been trained to play in a very specific way. This didn’t mean, however, that it would look the same and as City wished, produce the same results.
Gareth Taylor pushed this slow, possesion based style to the limit, whereby sometimes it felt like the aim was the keep the ball rather than score a goal. This created a contsant stream of backpasses and a very slow paced game.
The ultimate aim of this style was to eventually create a ‘perfect’ goalscoring opportunity that was impossible to miss, through sleek passing in the box. Shooting was therefore discouraged from anywhere outside the box and as such many moves would break down without a shot even being attempted.
The potential shot would go begging because they could not get close enough to the goal for it to be worth shooting, according to the system. This style with the entire team sitting so high obviously meant that City were succeptible to fast counter attacks quite often, and that is where any defensive issues usually arose. Generally, these were all the drawbacks of Taylor’s interpreation of ‘The City Way’ and what Cushing has looked to alter since coming in.
Whilst it is a smaller sample size, the vast difference in the possesion already shows a tweak in the system, and while it is true that four games out of the five being against Chelsea may affect that stat slightly, Taylor-led City did have 63% in their first league meeting this season.
This shows a drastic change, and that Cushing’s side is not only concentrating on keeping the ball, but rather being willing to adapt and try and hit teams on the counter attack when it is necessary, as well as trying to be more direct with the ball and switch it up. This has provided opposition defences with more to think about and forced them to consider different ways to defend. Another change that can be seen is the average distance away from from goal when a shot is taken.
This shows clearly that under Nick Cushing, the team is more encouraged to shoot from further out and “give it a go” rather than focus on creating a perfect chance before being allowed to shoot as they so often were under Taylor.
Whilst it is hard to evaluate after such few games, Cushing has certainly tweaked things tactically and it still remains to be seen whether this was a good decision. One thing that is true is considering the injuries decimating the squad, it is difficult to see how Taylor could have got his team playing much better in those four Chelsea games than Nick Cushing did, and that Brighton result with such a squad should not be sniffed at.
City next play away at Leicester City, and will hoping to buoy their top-three hopes with a strong win against the Foxes. Leicester v Manchester City is on the 27th April at 15:00 UK time.
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