Pep Guardiola could repeat Man City tactic that surprised West Ham

West Ham manager David Moyes was refreshingly open and honest when asked why his side struggled to cope with Manchester City last weekend.

On the face of it, City eased to a comfortable 2-0 win thanks to Erling Haaland. The striker's athleticism and ruthless finishing earned both of City's goals, as he proved how he can improve an already brilliant attacking set-up.

But as Moyes rightly pointed out after the game, it wasn't Haaland that made City so hard to play against — it was how Pep Guardiola positioned full-backs Kyle Walker and Joao Cancelo. Both pushed into the centre of the pitch to form a narrow midfield trio with Rodri, sitting ahead of a defensive two and an attacking five. The aim of the tactic is to guard the centre of the field against counter-attacks — West Ham's favoured route to goal. As Moyes explained, it achieved exactly that, while also creating more space out wide for Phil Foden and Jack Grealish to attack.

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"It caused us a different problem, they outnumbered us in midfield, we couldn't get on the ball," Moyes said.

"When we brought players in to cope they played to [Jack] Grealish or [Phil] Foden and got some width.

"We hadn't prepared for that because we hadn't really seen it but was really difficult tactically to deal with it. Over the years they've always brought one full-back in, [Oleksandr] Zinchenko last year, the two of them played there today and outnumbered us."

On that last point, Moyes got it both right and wrong. Inverting full-backs is nothing new for Guardiola's City; he trialled it for short periods in both 2020/21 and 2021/22 with Joao Cancelo, and even as far back as 2016/17 with Pablo