What is Wrong with Manchester City This Season?

The second half of 2013 hasn't been a great one sporting wise for the city of Manchester so far.

The other Old Trafford earlier this year

Their only big cricket test, and the biggest one to be held at the city's fabled and heavily revamped, Old Trafford ground for some time was washed out - although the result was a positive for the hosts as it meant the Ashes was retained.

Manchester United as mentioned many times before is a shadow of the championship winning side it was and those noisy neighbours aren't that much better to be honest either.

Yes, Manuel Pellegrini needs time to bed in at City particularly to get his philosophy of football across to a side that has been used to more physical and tighter stuff under Roberto Mancini but given the amount of money that City have, it quite galling to see such glaring deficiencies in the middle and at the back.

We all know that City spent a lot of money on attacking players, i.e. Alvaro Negredo, Jesus Navas and Stevan Jovetic - Negredo and Navas have definitely started well while Jovetic, highly rated from Fiorentina, has starred sporadically this season. They also let Gareth Barry go to Everton.

Yet, defensively, there were cracks starting to appear last season even with Vincent Kompany there and those cracks have been quite obvious as City look to play a more attractive, open and expansive style of football.

While such football will always leave your defence open and the likelihood of keeping a cleansheet lesser - as Brendan Rodgers has found out to his cost somewhat at Anfield - football games are about outscoring the other team and not conceding goals to the other team especially when you can't quite score 3 past the opposition.

In both regards, City have failed - against Villa they scored goals, but failed to keep the door shut, and against Bayern, they couldn't find a route to goal and failed to keep the door shut.

Indeed, the current German and European champions gave the former English champions a bit of a schooling in European football at home, totally dominating a large part of the game and while City did dominate at the end, they were already 3-0 down. It's to be expected from a side already so good, with undoubtedly the game's best coach right now in Pep Guardiola - credit to Pellegrini who Guardiola looked for inspiration in his coaching career.

Shoddy defense is to blame for the goals to Ribery and Muller although Muller's goal was obviously down to a huge defensive error - ball watching, a basic error let to Muller stooping in from behind to score a deserved second goal for Bayern, while City really should have done better in closing down the threat of Ribery down the wing.

Negredo has been City's brightest spark this season

Fortunately, City are in a much easier group than they have been in the last two seasons - they should really beat CSKA Moscow in the next two games and finish off Viktoria Plzen at home, and thus make the 2nd round. But getting beyond that, is probably beyond City at this time unless they can really improve defensively.

And so is winning the Premier League title at this time. They could learn one thing from their rivals - it is a bit hard to win the title when you've lost 3 games out of 6 so early in the season.