Those figures for Siopis prove where I was wrong in the past - back in the days under Russell Slade when we’d often be in the thirties when it came to possession, I’d preach that possession was everything. Since then, I’ve learned it’s not - for example, we had comfortably more of the ball (56/44?) than Sunderland on Friday for all of the good it did us and if you ever see a City possession figure in the sixties, it usually means we’ve lost. Passing without enough creativity like City do should be easy because there are few risky passes played, but the lack of basic techniques among some of our players makes even that look hard.
To use an extreme example, a player like DeBruyne could have a passing accuracy rate of one hundred per cent if he was so minded, but he plays many passes with a high risk of failure because he’s trying to be creative and open up defences. Siopis’ job in whichever side he plays in should be to win the ball for his team’s more creative players, but a typical City side usually has up to nine players who are, at best, only capable of playing the very occasional defence splitting pass. We didn’t need Siopis because we had plenty of his type already.