A corner turned?

Manchester City fans - and FPL managers who own any of their players - seem to be taking much encouragement from their emphatic 6-0 win this weekend.

But is this one success really a sign that their troubles are over? Are they really that much better?

Well, here are some of the potential positives:

Kyle Walker's gone now; that can only be a good thing. His pace and stamina have looked to be waning rapidly of late, and he's really begun to look as if he's past it at Premier League level. His last few performances, certainly, have been quite dreadful (perhaps he's also been distracted by his turbulent private life, or greedy thoughts of getting ready to take the Saudi money in the twilight of his career?), and he had become a liability to the team.

But Ruben Dias is back - that's HUGE, immediately makes them look so much more solid and well-organised and confident in defence.

Ederson's back too. Though Ortega is a a more than competent replacement (probably, in fact, as good as Ederson in most aspects of the goalkeeping craft; an excellent shot-stopper), Ederson is the man the rest of the team have been used to playing with most of the time, so his return to the side will also probably inject some comfortable - and confidence-building - familiarity to the rear of the lineup, a feeling which has been lacking of late. And his stellar distribution adds another dimension to City's game - allowing them the ready option to abandon the slow build-up from the back occasionally and try more direct medium-length or even long balls up the park... with sufficient accuracy to produce a high chance that they will reach, and be retained by a City player. (It does make you wonder why he was out of the side for so long in the first place, though. There may have been some small injury issues behind some of it, but it did look also as if Pep had some kind of a 'problem' with him for a while - a matter of not liking his 'attitude' about something, perhaps?)

Matheus Nunes is still struggling to adapt to the full-back role, but he's an intelligent and versatile player who should be able to master it eventually. And anything is an improvement on Walker....

Dropping Rico Lewis is also probably going to make the team stronger. I am a big fan - as Pep evidently is - of his enthusiasm and workrate, his game intelligence, the incisive contribution he can make in advanced midfield areas. But he's still very young and inexperienced, and he just doesn't have the physicality to be able to dominate in individual duels; playing him as a makeshift full-back, particularly when out-of-touch Walker was on the other flank, or alongside on the right of the defence, was asking for trouble. He had, unfortunately, become - yet another - obvious defensive weakness that opponents can ruthlessly target.

Gundogan and Kovacic playing together as a double-pivot, and trying to sit a little deeper, does appear to provide the potential for a little more solidity in central midfield.

Kevin DeBruyne is starting to look something like his best again now. It has taken a while for him to get his 'match-fitness' back, and his contributions in his first few games back from injury had been rather intermittent. But in this one, he was a constant threat and supplied three assists.

And damn, yes, Erling Haaland is looking as though he has definitively rediscovered his scoring touch. (Although I've always tended to think that there was never much wrong with his form or confidence. He'd just been starved of service while the rest of the team was floundering so badly over the previous couple of months.)

And perhaps best of all, Phil Foden has not just got his scoring boots back, but seems to have rekindled his joie de vivre as well. This is the first time in a long while we've seen him looking so happy and confident, showing such exuberant joy on the pitch.

And a lot of people are also saying that the arrival of the pacey Egyptian forward Omar Marmoush could have a transformative effect for City in the near future. Adam Monk of FourFourTwo rates his prospects with the club very highly. He does appear to have a skills profile and versatility somewhat similar to the departed Julian Alvarez - perhaps enabling him to sometimes play alongside Haaland as a strike partner, as well as to fulfill a number of different attacking midfield roles through the middle or on either flank (rather than being merely an emergency replacement for Haaland).

Yes, there's a lot to take comfort from there. But I believe there are many, rather stronger counter-points:

Well, that victory was only against Ipswich; and Ipswich were really, really poor in that game - just gave up the ghost after the first couple of goals. Proving that you're not one of the four worst teams in the League isn't really evidence of any seismic shift in performance.

Dias still doesn't look quite 100% - and you worry if Pep might be rushing him back into the fray just a little bit, perhaps putting him at risk of a recurrence of his injury. (So, indeed, it would appear! The poor bloke broke down during the PSG game just a few days later, and had to be withdrawn at half-time. Ooops!)  Also, excellent though he is, he can't hold things together at the back entirely on his own; he needs Stones and Ake to be back in action too.

Matheus Nunes is not a natural full-back, and is struggling to adapt to the position at the moment (it's probably not helping when Pep switches him from one side to the other), and he has been making a lot of mistakes thus far. Also, it just seems to be a bit of a waste of his talents; it is quite baffling that Pep doesn't seem to fancy playing him in his best position in central midfield - especially since that is the area of the pitch where his worst problems are manifesting themselves. [JJ Bull of The Athletic recently suggested that he'd do better to reunite with Ruben Amorim at Manchester United and play in a double-pivot with Manuel Ugarte there.]

While Rico Lewis has occasionally looked a bit of a liability defensively, he's nevertheless been one of City's best players this season, and it is therefore, I think, unfortunate to abandon him completely. There ought to be a way to make use of him in a more advanced role.

Gundogan, unfortunately, now looks hopelessly out-of-his-depth at the top level, just does not have any legs any more. Pep seems to be guilty of a misplaced loyalty here, or an exaggerated gratitude for his past contributions, or is perhaps overrating the value of experience. Playing Gundogan as a defensive midfielder now has much the same effect as Casemiro has whenever Amorim is forced to field him at United: it's just an open invitation to the opponents to come marauding through the central areas at will.

And Mateo Kovacic, bless him, is a fantastic progressive No. 6, great passer of the ball, dangerous when pushing forward himself - but doesn't have a defensive bone in his body; he completely lacks the all-around awareness, the instinct to spot danger that is required for a stopper role. Persisting with him as a Rodri replacement is the main root of City's current problems. And those problems are NOT going to go away unless they can acquire a top-class defensive midfielder in this transfer window. (And I think they might have to settle for a loan deal on that - because who's going to transfer into a club to be a perpetual understudy to someone like Rodri for the next five years?)

DeBruyne still doesn't look 100% fit (not sure if this is so, but I read somewhere that he might have a small hernia - much like the problem that so impeded Son Heung-min last season; not a major disability, but a constant, niggling inhibitor of performance). And he's starting to show his age. It is probably not reasonable to expect him to ever quite regain the pinnacle of performance he was demonstrating a few years ago.

Haaland, of course, could still deliver some big goalscoring returns. But he's not the kind of player who - like Salah or Palmer or Mbeumo.... - creates chances for himself out of nothing; he needs good regular service. And I fear he's still likely to be often lacking that from this City side. Moreover, game states can have a big impact on patterns of play and on a striker's mentality: there's a lot of extra pressure on the main goalscorer when you're chasing the game - and City look like they might still quite often be chasing games.

I am a huge fan of Phil Foden, and I - more than anyone! - really hope that he has turned a corner this season, that he has ironed something out in his relationship with Pep that has restored his confidence, and that he is going to continue now to play with the effervescence he showed last Sunday. But that hope is still fragile. Phil thrived on the security of being an almost invariable starter for most of last season, in DeBruyne's absence, and on being given the responsibility of being the club's primary playmaker. And he thrives on being able to play in central areas as a highly mobile No. 10. If Pep is going to constantly swap his starting position around, and mostly ask him to play out wide on one of the flanks, I fear this new flowering of goalscoring form may soon wither again.

And I think it may be unreasonable to expect Omar Marmoush to be The Messiah to redeem City. He has not been an especially prolific scorer (apart from one very hot streak for Frankfurt earlier this season); in fact, until he moved to Frankfurt just under 18 months ago, he was almost entirely unacquainted with the goal. And, you know, the Bundesliga isn't exactly the same level of competition as the Premier League: even its top clubs would probably struggle against most of our leading teams; the majority of teams in that league would struggle in the Championship.

And, ahem, City now have one of the toughest runs of fixtures coming up that any side - certainly any top side - has to face in the second half of the season (along with two crunch games to try to avoid the ignominy of Champions League elimination at the group stage... and the dear old FA Cup). They might have a real struggle for points from now until some time in March: Chelsea, Arsenal, Newcastle, Liverpool, Spurs (terrible at the moment; but a bogey team for City in recent years), and Nottingham Forest is an horrendous sequencc. Brighton, Manchester United and Crystal Palace - and a fighting-for-their-lives Leicester - might not be a pushover after that either. The way City were playing up until a few weeks ago, it would not have been outrageous to suggest they might lose all of them. And I'm afraid I still think it's very likely they'll lose at least half of them.

So - NO, sorry; I am not at all convinced we've yet seen any clear sign of a City renaissance.

[And sure enough, the very next night they got absolutely torn apart by Paris St Germain. Despite rather fortuitously opening up a two-goal lead in the first half, they were outplayed for almost the whole game and ended up getting spanked 4-2.... and it might have been much worse.  City's problems are deep-seated and persistent. They might be capable of significant improvement.... but they're not about to get GOOD again any time soon.]

A week further on, they have scraped through into the knockout stage of the Champions League - but only by the skin of their teeth! Again, City can't take much comfort from a fairly dismal performance against Club Brugge: they were regularly cut open by the Belgian side on the counter-attack, conceded the first goal... and very nearly went behind again when Greek forward Christos Tzolis cracked a low 20-yard shot inches wide of the post - with Ederson rooted to the spot. If that one had gone in, I doubt if City could have found a way back into the game. 

And their ultimately fairly comfortable win over Chelsea at the weekend was a bit of a head-scratcher - really more down to Chelsea being surprisingly lacklustre rather than City being at all brilliant. They are still looking... well, not just a pale shadow of the team that dominated every competition in the the last few years, but a completely different team; a much, much worse team, a really rather shambolic team, who look like they could not just get beaten but properly spanked by just about any half-decent side. In his post-match interview on Sunday, Pep was again extremely downbeat; positively careworn and depressed-looking. And he came out with one of the most self-damning remarks I think I've ever heard from a Premier League manager, when he said, "Without the ball, we are one of the worst teams. We need the ball to survive."  No, even Pep doesn't think City are any good again yet. They're hanging on by their fingernails, only occasionally giving themselves a chance in games by trying even harder than usual never to give the ball away. But no team manages never to give the ball away; and, at the moment, every time City give the ball away, they look like they might concede a goal.