TheGame Podcast: Manchester City a club in crisis

This week Phill Jupitus is joined by Oliver Kay, Nick Szczepanik and Gabriele Marcotti to debate the biggest issues in football.

Among the topics this week:
1. Find out why Manchester City are in deep trouble despite their terrific result against West Ham.

2. Hear Oliver Kay's concern about plans to reform the Premier League.

3. Get the inside track on which players can perform for you in this year's Fantasy Football games (clue: Rafa Benitez is trying to buy most of them).

4. Hear the team's thoughts on Rafa Benitez's latest tactical tinkering and where Steven Gerrard and Robbie Keane fit in.

5. Listen to our new internet section, in which the team deal with the issues that are dominating the message boards.

6. Find out what your name would be if you were a Brazilian footballer...

Click here to download the podcast

Click here to subscribe via iTunes

Click here to stream the podcast

Click here to subscribe via RSS

Comments

[Rich Phippen]

Unfortunately, there's not a better place for me to post this, so please excuse the irrelevance to the above article.

This has always been my number one podcast, but I was utterly dismayed at the mickey taking of Charlton in week one. "Curbs has got West Ham playing like Charlton!" it was said. Well, when we were under Curbs, we were constantly praised for our style of football.

But this podcast is elitist. Despite the joke that is the competitoin of the Premier league, these guys still manage to find 30 minutes of Chelsea/ United/ Arsenal/ Liverpool stuff to talk about. And treat a small, harmless club like Charlton with disdain.

Our demise, our predicament, it's a damning indictment of the current set up of football in this country. But it's much easier to talk about Torres hair and how crap Charlton were under Curbs eh lads?

There's talk about agents sucking money out of the game that is football. But for me, the plethora of self-appointed experts are waaaaay worse.

If only you talked about the real problems in football. If only.

[David]

From what I have seen of the season so far I think the title race this season will be the closest since the creation of the premier league in 1992. This is due to all the big four having obvious weaknesses which have so far been exposed. Liverpool lack real quality wide players to create chances in tight games, the fact that they play Kuyt on the wings merely highlights this. They also lack sources of goals across the team as the only regular goal scorers in the team are Torres and Gerrard. Championship winning teams usually have 3 or 4 regular sources of goals at least. Man utd are struggling to score goals with out Ronaldo who scored 40% of theirleague goals last season. They are creating chances but badly need some one to put them away during Ronaldos absence. Arsenal really lack a holding midfielder which prevents them from retaining possession, which stops them from being able to play with the flair which we associate with Arsenal. They also lack strength in depth. Chelsea biggest problem is that to me their midfield is unbalanced. Ballack, Lampard and Deco are to similar and tend to stick to similar areas of the park. Playing all 3 also means a lack of any width what so ever. This means that the full backs have to bomb very far forward to give width when attacking. This leads them vulnerable on the break and exposes the centre backs. On Sunday Wigan exploited this and had lots of possession in the Chelsea half and created chances. With out a doubt better teams than Wigan will no doubt have scored plenty of goals on Sunday. If this continues, Chelsea will Concede goals a plenty and championship winning teams need to be sound defensively something I do not see Chelsea being this season if Sundays any thing to go by