For Kyle Walker Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final against his boyhood team, Sheffield United, may point towards the start of his Manchester City endgame.
The defender could suspect as much without knowing it – yet. A leitmotif of Pep Guardiola’s serial success has been a genius for keeping multimillionaire footballers guessing. The Pep Way decrees that no one is ever fully in, no one ever fully out. But for Walker, whose contract ends in June 2024 when he will be 34, a reading of the runes may tell him where a garlanded City career is heading under a ruthless manager who is the ultimate team-first operator.
Joe Hart, Yaya Touré, Sergio Agüero, Vincent Kompany, Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne and Riyad Mahrez are some of the stellar names who can confirm this – by the timing of their Eastlands exit or exclusions from the starting XI.
Walker’s fall in status from a starting berth has come in the past six or seven weeks as he experiences a fate that has befallen many under Guardiola’s tutelage. Dropped by the Catalan then publicly critiqued is a trope of this hyper-intense football man’s trophy-rich tenure.
Walker’s has been perhaps the most stark of all the Guardiola “constructive criticisms” offered to the media. Since the 2-0 defeat of Newcastle on 4 March, the champions have played eight matches and the manager has chosen him only twice – for last Saturday’s 3-1 win over Leicester and a 6-0 FA Cup drubbing of Burnley.
For two of the three key outings in this sequence – a 4-1 victory over Liverpool and the Champions League 3-0 first-leg defeat of Bayern Munich – Walker was granted zero minutes. In Wednesday’s 1-1 return at the Allianz Arena, he entered with 120 seconds of normal time remaining.
Deciphering Guardiola’s selection choices can be a fool’s game, of course. So it may be pure coincidence that Walker became footballer non grata after the incident in a Wilmslow bar in which he appeared to “expose himself” the day after Newcastle were defeated.
Guardiola then said: “I spoke with [Kyle] but I don’t have to remind [him of responsibilities]. I’m not a father. I’m a friend of his. [After] seven years I know in the past many things happened – so he and everyone can count on me for personal issues.”
A week later police said Walker would not face criminal charges, though he was served an out of court disposal order which is used, according to Cheshire police’s website, to discharge “low-level crime and antisocial behaviour instead of taking an offender to court”.
After this show of support as a “friend” at the start of the month came the show of coldness regarding Walker’s professional capabilities. To explain why he has become a substitute, at best, Guardiola pointed to the system in which a defender steps forward to make an extra man in midfield.
“He cannot do it. He will always have pace – Kyle at 60 years old will be the fastest player in this room. To play inside you have to have educated movements – he doesn’t have every one of the characteristics. He has played as a full-back coming inside in the past with four at the back. He has done really well but in this shape of three at the back and two in the middle, he cannot do it.”
Except Guardiola’s rearguard when defending is always a four not a three and in each Bayern leg Guardiola deployed a central defender, John Stones, to step out and preferred Manuel Akanji at right-back: the position Walker has built a career on – for City and England.
After the World Cup, Guardiola was stern about Kalvin Phillips, characterising him as overweight, the midfielder the latest to feel his displeasure regarding conditioning. So unless Walker visited the Wilmslow bar without drinking alcohol, it may not be a leap to imagine his trip there on a day off when the wrong side of 30 may have had a bearing on his loss of a first-team jersey.
The demotion could have been coming. After February’s 3-1 victory over Aston Villa Guardiola offered a first hint that Walker had not previously been training as desired. “Everyone is so focused,” he said. “Kyle is back, the way he is behaving. Many players are the same and this is the only chance to be competitive.”
Predictions of Walker’s demise may be proved premature, of course. He is a shoo-in to face the Blades given City’s exhausting late-season schedule, which Guardiola referenced after knocking Bayern out, and the manager has form for reinstating those he has discarded.
But you do wonder if the FA Cup will prove Walker’s best hope of the City swansong he deserves with any other appearances in the shirt cameo turns, at best.
