Crisis point: Is Man City slump all Pep Guardiola's fault? And can he turn it around?

Pep Guardiola isn’t at the point of publicly admitting it, but we’re already a long way from the October days when he would roll his eyes at questions over the intensity of the Premier League. Those close to the Manchester City hierarchy say that he is finding the division a lot more difficult than he anticipated.

That is obvious, but what has become a much more contested element of the crisis - and this is undeniably a crisis, in the context of performance against expectation - is how much it affects Guardiola’s overall reputation; how much this fortifies the idea that so much of his previous success was based on the status of his clubs; and how much he is directly responsibility for these poor results.

There are very few things that can be stated with certainty at present, but this is one: City are not on the level of his Barcelona or even Bayern Munich, and Guardiola is in a league with far more competitive teams. That alone means it would have been immensely impressive had he got this side to dominate in the way his previous clubs did, and that a few more difficulties should have been expected along the way.

But this is the thing. No matter what spin anyone tries to put on City’s season so far, it’s impossible not to say Guardiola’s reign has been disappointing. It’s also remarkable that we’re talking about the club potentially missing out on the Champions League, after conceding four goals for the second time this season, given the reputation he came with; given the excitement.

The question now is: how can he turn things around?

A little like his long-time rival Jose Mourinho last season, this is a situation Guardiola has never had to deal with before. And a lot like Jose Mourinho last season, it’s a situation he’s struggling to deal with. That is what most comes across on the many occasions that Guardiola looks frazzled on the line, gets chippy with an interviewer, offers bizarre explanations, or just stares so intensely at the ground in the way he conspicuously did during the 4-0 humiliation at Everton.

Guardiola really isn’t dealing with things at all. He is still persisting with the same mistakes, the same approach, even when it is clear that Premier League teams are now always looking to attack his team in the same way - and often succeeding.

That, beyond the goalkeeping situation, is perhaps Guardiola’s biggest error so far. Ever the fundamentalist, he keeps insisting that his team play a certain way so that they can intrinsically understand it in the long term, but it just isn’t working in the short term.

City are just so embarrassingly easy to get at. Any time the much-vaunted possession breaks down, there is danger. It says so much that Everton scored four goals from just four shots on Sunday. That obviously brings us to Claudio Bravo, and the decision to keep playing him is obviously a key part of this fundamentalism.

Guardiola’s nature is to persist with Bravo until it works, and he deeply feels that the net long-term effect of having a goalkeeper comfortable on the ball is worth the short-term risk. It’s just that the short-term risk has become a medium-term issue, and could become a long-term problem if he continues.

Guardiola publicly acts like it isn’t a problem, but that is of course to protect his under-pressure player. He and his staff are well aware of the issue. They couldn’t not be. There is a recognition that their high-profile signing is letting in a lot of goals and looks low on confidence, but there are currently no concrete plans to bring back Joe Hart - despite some calls from outside the club - or to try an alternative No. 1 this season.

This is what is most puzzling about Guardiola right now: he isn't reacting to what he knows is wrong. He is aware of the issue in the goalkeeping position, and is also said to have been struck by how tactically unsophisticated so many of his City squad are in contrast to Bayern and Barca. That is why they want to be much more active in the market, and the objective at the club for the last two years has been to completely reshape the first XI.

This does raise relevant questions about the recruitment process. If that has been the plan for so long, and they have been fully certain that Guardiola would be the manager for the 2016-17 season for almost a year, why wasn’t the side more suited to what he wanted?

This is an issue that goes back further than City. Guardiola is said to feel indebted to his former Barcelona team-mate and current director of football Txiki Beguiristain for having so much faith in him when a rookie manager pitching for the main Camp Nou job in 2008, but he can't feel too indebted to him for many of the signings made during his time. Recruitment for that stellar side was a frequent issue in an otherwise fantastic era, as illustrated by so many duds like Dmytro Chygrynskiy, Alex Hleb, Keirrison and even Zlatan Ibrahimovic. They often struggled to get key positions like centre-half right, and had to improvise with decisions like using Javier Mascherano.

Yet, for a manager who is probably most celebrated for his hands-on coaching, and the imagination of his ideas, there doesn’t seem to be much of that at the Etihad right now. He hasn’t really coached the players who won’t fit in the medium-term to perform better, and there has been almost no adaptation to how things work in the league. The closest we saw to the latter was John Stones looking to hammer the ball away against Everton rather than pass, but that instance still led to an opposition goal.

He hasn't responded. There's been an inertia. The big wonder now is whether Guardiola can fix this, or whether it can actually get worse.

If half the issue is City's squad and another half what the manager is doing with it, how quickly can either be addressed? How much of this, for example, is down to the mere fact Guardiola has never faced anything like this before? How much is down to the time taken to adjust?

It should be re-asserted that it would be ridiculous to think this takes away from his previous successes. Barcelona may have been one of the greatest teams of all time, but you don’t reach that kind of level unless every key element is working to the maximum; unless everything is perfect. A manager coasting on their talent couldn't make the team achieve what they did, and anyone who has seen how Guardiola actually works would never say he coasted. He looks to control every aspect of the team.

Right now, though, results feel almost completely out of his control. That is how he can somehow go from 5-0 wins to 4-0 defeats. The former against West Ham should be a reminder of what they can still be possible of when there is the right balance, the latter a check against Guardiola’s worst indulgences.

He currently needs to find a system that allows his dazzling attacking passing, but isn't so defensively fragile. He surely needs to make some changes to his defence. Otherwise, far from rolling his eyes, this City side will continue to get rolled over.