Bruno Fernandes dissects Manchester derby defeat in detail

When asked what part he played in allowing Foden to have a free header in the box for the opener, Bruno provided incredible detail in his response.

“I was trying to press Rodri,” he explained. “Because the aim before the game was one of the midfielders to drop on Rodri and one of the defenders jumping on Foden. In the moment I can cover both, Leny [Yoro] decides to come up. When I look at him, I see he comes up, so I try to go a little bit more towards Rodri. [Josko] Gvardiol does a good pass to Foden and Leny is going backwards because our miscommunication.

“We end up giving too much space for them to go up the pitch. It’s what I mean when I say to take more risk and we have to be more brave, with the last line being a little bit more high, as you see City. Every time we passed the ball backwards to our centre-backs, it was three-v-three and the line squeezes so much, it’s difficult to play through the lines as the space between them are very narrow.

“We play with a back five, sometimes a back four or three, whatever you want to call it. We need people to be very aggressive in the moments of pressure. We need to get the moment to jump in otherwise, otherwise the midfielders get overloaded. Look at City, with Rodri, Tijjani [Reijnders], Bernardo [Silva] coming in. They had Foden to make basically four against the two men. So you need the ones in behind you to jump, Luke [Shaw] was doing well on Tijjani. We did it well against Arsenal. They didn’t find the spaces to play, it’s what makes the space very narrow for team to play against a team that is very aggressive when you go on the front foot.

“If you’re not brave enough to do that, it’s very difficult and they will find spaces and gaps because you’re playing a team that is not a bad opponent. When you play team with that quality, they will find small gaps and play the balls.”