Pep Guardiola’s year will rightly be defined by luscious attacking football but his improvisation at left back should not be far behind.
There is more than a touch of genius in converting Fabian Delph into a defender, a decision made at the end of August. Remarkably, Guardiola even claims that idea took him too long to arrive at.
Delph has performed marvellously in Benjamin Mendy’s absence but, with him out with a knee injury, Manchester City required another solution here.
Not Danilo, the obvious deputy, but Oleksandr Zinchenko.