Arsenal could rue transfer failure as Man City offer January blueprint | OneFootball

Omar Marmoush is exactly the sort of player the Gunners need, and could prove as much in Emirates showdown

Manchester City have not got a great deal right this season. When they have in the past, such have been the levels of resource, playing ability and coaching genius involved that suggesting other clubs simply copy and paste their methods for success would be obscene.

Of those, Juma Bah has been immediately sent to Lens on loan, while 18-year-old Christian McFarlane has been signed as a prospect from within the City Football Group, at New York City FC.

Young defenders Vitor Reis and Abdukodir Khusanov, though, have come straight in to bolster the first-team squad (and, a little too hastily, into the first XI in the latter’s case). And in Omar Marmoush, City may well have signed that supposed rarest of things: a January addition ready to make a genuine impact from the start.

Having arrived already in form from Eintracht Frankfurt, with 15 goals and 10 assists in just 17 Bundesliga games this term, Marmoush made a lively debut in last weekend’s 3-1 victory over Chelsea at the Etihad Stadium.

In the same week that Phil Foden bemoaned his struggle for impact when stranded on the left for England at last summer’s Euros, it was notable how far Marmoush was given license to drift across City’s forward line, bringing unpredictability to an attack often accused of the opposite.

“Man City need that,” Gary Neville said on commentary. “You see quite often that Jeremy Doku and Jack Grealish want the ball to feet. This kid runs without the ball.

Playing just off Erling Haaland, the Egyptian’s darts off the last defender - Reece James usually cast in the Neville role in this instance - brought a new dimension to City’s attack, one which Guardiola admitted afterwards that his midfield players will have to learn to exploit.

“He made incredible movements that players in the middle could not see,” Guardiola explained. “I think [Ilkay] Gundogan, and [Mateo] Kovacic, and Bernardo [Silva], they should be more clever in the movements with the high line that Chelsea had.

“But it’s a question of time, knowing each other. At the end, we don’t know the movements of him, the movement he likes, it needs time.”

Arsenal will hope that a week is not enough. Given Marmoush was not eligible to face Club Brugge in the Champions League in midweek, he appears likely to start at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday and the risk is that the Gunners will be left to rue the failure to freshen up their own attack so far this month, with Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Jesus out.

Interestingly, a failed bid for Ollie Watkins this week saw the Gunners target a similar kind of game-stretching forward, the kind of player they, like City until now, lack. No player in the Premier League has made more runs in behind per 90 minutes this season than Watkins’s 10.4; Gabriel Martinelli is Arsenal’s top-ranked player by the same metric, at 7.2.

Whether Arsenal go back in for Watkins, or any other forward, remains to be seen. Any purchase made now will not feature until the other side of a training camp in Dubai in February, in any case, and certainly, there are not too many Marmoushs’ around; players fit, in form, available to buy mid-season and ready to make a difference to an elite club.

As my colleague, Dan Kilpatrick, argues in the case of Spurs in his column this week, though, among the richest clubs, the impossibility of doing things this month can be conveniently overblown.

City have shown it is possible and, for once, following their lead might not be an unrealistic demand.