The Etihad Stadium has become English football’s unyielding fortress. Since the start of the 2011-12 season Manchester City have won 87 per cent of Premier League matches at their stronghold and lost just two. They average 2.69 points and 2.78 goals per game.
The blizzard of statistics that confirm Eastlands as a graveyard for visiting sides continues with the 125 goals City have scored and the mere 29 they have conceded in the 45 league games in two and half years.
As Arsenal arrive for today’s lunchtime kick-off to try to emulate what only Norwich City and Manchester United have managed the past two years – hand City a home defeat – Arsene Wenger tries to dismiss the Etihad’s mystique.
“It makes you less nervous before the game because the history of the results go for you,” the Frenchman says of the spring that the sequence puts in the steps of Manuel Pellegrini’s players. “But in big games that doesn’t count too much. On the big games it is more focused on the day, less on what you have done before. You have to prepare to be at your best.”
Roberto Mancini built the citadel in Manchester's blue zone before his sacking last season and Pellegrini continues to fortify it with this campaign's record of a perfect seven wins, 29 goals scored and just two conceded.
Irresistible at home
The Chilean is clear why City are irresistible at home. "Firstly because we have a style of play which is important for the players we have," he says. "We have important creative players and the way we play allows them to score goals – have more chances to score. So important players don't miss so many chances at home."
Away their record is less convincing. City lost four of their opening six matches before the victory at West Bromwich Albion and draw at Southampton last week, and have scored only 12 times while allowing 13 against them.
To try to explain why Sergio Aguero, Yaya Toure, David Silva, Samir Nasri and Alvaro Negredo can be so muted on the road, Pellegrini says: “Maybe away it is normal not to have the same chances. But we are working to try similarly to how we do at home. That’s why it is so important the game we won in Munich [3-2 against Bayern]. It meant we have won the three Champions League games away. You’ll see in the Premier League what will happen in the future – we will continue to work and play in our style.”
To the non-football aficionado the fillip home turf advantage provides can be a puzzle. Garry Birtles was a member of the Nottingham Forest team that went 42 league games unbeaten, equivalent to a whole season in the First Division era, between November 1977 and November 1978. The record held until Wenger's Arsenal Invincibles went 49 without defeat between May 2003 and October 2004. Twenty-one of Forest's 42 games came on their own patch. Birtles says teams were simply intimidated on visiting the City Ground.
Hostile atmosphere
"Without a doubt. The atmosphere could be very hostile at times. The adrenaline rush that it could give you was tremendous, you could hear the buzz, you didn't know what was going on, a massive buzz around the ground.
“I think it’s a little bit different now to what it was then. Because at that point there was standing, the atmosphere seemed to be more intense, fans closer to the pitch. As players, we fed off that atmosphere.
“The thing was we were playing under a couple of geniuses called [Brian ]Clough and [ Peter ]Taylor and they just gave you so much confidence to go out there and say: ‘Right you’re the best. Respect your opposition but you’re well better than them.’
“And you went out there thinking you weren’t going to get beaten. You just felt you wanted to beat teams, you wanted to beat them badly. You wanted to score as many goals as possible. We always went out there and wanted to inflict as much pain on teams as we possibly could. [also], I played with some great players.”
For Martin Perry, a confidence coach whose clients have included Colin Montgomerie and Aaron Ramsey, Arsenal’s performer of the season, being successful away from home comforts is all about the mind.
He cites basketball’s greatest ever player to make the point. “Michael Jordan, when he played for Chicago [Bulls], whenever he travelled he used to have a process where he’d familiarise himself with the arena. Say he was playing in LA, he had a process when he arrived, where basically he would introduce himself to all the staff at the venue – the doormen, the safety advisers – as part of the process of making himself feel at home.
“Then he’d go out on court, generally by himself, way before the game started and talk to the court. He’d say: ‘Hello,’ to it. He’d visualise plays, he’d see exactly how he’d want [the game] to play out. And when he’d done that he’d sit in the stands and talk to the seats, say hello to them, introduce himself and put himself in the mind of spectator there, imagining someone from LA watching him play.
“What he was doing was taking away the unknown – which if it is a venue you only play in occasionally doesn’t have anything like the same familiarity as your home stadium. I’m talking about nervous or sensory impressions, because what’s happening is that everything looks different: colours, the advertising, fans, how they’re dressed.
"People sitting in seats are not the same people you see every week in your own ground. Your nervous system is having to take in all those new impressions and process all that information and as a result it uses up energy. So when he performed there, because he wasn't using up nervous energy and felt completely comfortable, his talent could flow.
Home and away
"That's the principle about home and away. Football teams don't do this. They get out of the coach, and what do they do? They wander on to the pitch with programmes and mobile phones. That doesn't make any sense, does it? Because they're not actually processing it."
Birtles offers an illustration from September 1978 of how Clough’s instinctive psychology could combat the difficulties of playing away. “The most hostile experience I’ve ever had in football was going to Anfield at the peak of Liverpool’s powers,” he says. “We got there for the second leg of the European Cup. All the Kop used to get there early. Brian Clough said: ‘I want you all out on the pitch now, I want you at the end towards the Kop.’
“We could have gone to the other end – it was empty. But we stood on the edge of the box [near the Kop] and the Liverpool fans were throwing oranges and all sorts at us. A tennis ball came on and John Robertson flicked it up and volleyed it into the net and the Kop just rose in applause.”
While Forest drew 0-0 to reach the second round, en route to the first of consecutive European Cup triumphs, Wenger knows that City’s 2.78 goals-a-game average at the Etihad means Arsenal may have to score three goals to win, as Manchester United and Norwich needed for their victories.
It could make for a riveting spectacle.
Guardian Service
