De Bruyne tore through this defense from finding little spaces between Winks and CBs that none of them tracked, and then crossing. That second goal is because De Bruyne finds a lovely position there and Winks is just jogging and marking absolutely no one. But Lucas comes on, Sissoko becomes a full time DM and suddenly he and Ndombele now chase every single City shirt at the same time.
The result: City still create heaps of chances but they’re mostly half chances, the AMs don’t get time to make a perfect ball. De Bruyne not nearly as lethal. Before 57’ they had 2.42 xG as per understat. Then Lucas comes on, Sisssoko DM, they have 0.81 xG next 37 minutes. Still bad, but not nearly as bad.
I can give you examples of Sissoko letting people run off him after being moved back to CM, like when KWP got striped by Sterling. It carried on throughout that game. He was also the reason KWP got ripped in the opening half hour and was doing much more ball watching than Winks was in the first half.
Also we have to bare in mind that from 34th to 55th minute we were a goal behind and still had to try and play some football and get a goal back, once we scored the dynamics of that changed and we became more defensive and less ambitious as a collective.
Their x/g did go down, but so did our ability to play any football, before Winks went off we were averaging 5 passes a minute, after he went off it halved to 2.6 a minute and our x/g went from a pitiful 0.10 to 0.11, an increase 0.01 x/g in the remaining 36 minutes. That's horrendous.
I have no problem with putting Moura in to that game, but if he could have sured us up a bit, whilst maintaining some counter threat without taking Winks off, as once Winks went off, we pretty much just conceded control of the game completely, and to do that with City invariably invites pressure and they rarely fail to turn pressure into goals, which they did, only for us to get a very generous hand ball call curtesy of VAR call.
I would have understood it more if he'd taken Eriksen off, and gone 433 with and 451 without the ball and moved Sissoko to RM with Lamela and Moura outside without the ball, making it harder for them to pull us around in midfield and overload the flanks, but all he really did was turn us into a bus with no wheels.