1. Apart from City’s traditional strikers, James Milner is the best they have to lead the attacks
Manuel Pellegrini was a busy man in training last week, working on the best way to keep their winning streak going despite losing Sergio Aguero, Stevan Jovetic and Edin Dzeko to injuries.
The City boss settled for Milner and the England midfielder may not have scored but he proved that he is the best they currently have for the task.
Jose Pozo had his chance to lead the attacks before but that did not work well as the slight young forward barely affected the defensive lines of opponents and he offered little in terms of building up attacks.
Samir Nasri and David Silva have also had chunks of game time as centre forwards but they were also ineffective.
Milner may not have been the targetman that City have in their traditional strikers but the midfielder was effective. He worked across Palace’s defensive line in a Thomas Muller-like, mobile centre-forward style, which created space behind him for midfield runners to score.
2. January cannot arrive soon enough for Neil Warnock
The Eagles are very much in the relegation battle and that is mainly because of their quality in the final-third or lack thereof. The five most advanced players that started this game had only managed a combined total of five goals this season.
In this game, they had a couple of good chances to test Joe Hart but they only mustered one shot on target. Warnock was understandably livid after the game when asked about James McArthur’s wrongly disallowed goal because that was the best attempt they had and it was incorrectly chalked off.
3. Vincent Kompany’s absence is a big problem for City“I can’t blame the wingers for not tracking back, it was a defender who let us down,” grimaced Warnock as he pinned the blame for David Silva’s opening goal on Palace’s defenders who left the left channel too open.
Whenever City had the ball, the Eagles’ back-four had to form a compact line across their 18-yard box to deny City’s midfield runners the space to attack the channels.
That back four may have been culpable for the goal but those Eagles did a decent job for about 50 minutes as they denied City a single attempt on target. They were bound to make an error after defending for very long periods of the game against a top class side that had more than 70 per cent possession.
5. Manuel Pellegrini deserves more credit for adapting his tactics
Pellegrini, who is widely criticised for lacking flexibility with his tactics, once again proved without much fuss that he can adapt his tactics to get a win if need be.
This time without a recognised striker the Chilean manager tasked Milner to stretch Palace’s defence thereby freeing space in the offensive third for Silva, Yaya Toure and Samir Nasri to attack.
