A month ago, Pep Guardiola considered the prospects of the player who had made most appearances for him as a full-back and concluded he could not play full-back in a Pep Guardiola team. Or not this team and this system, anyway. “He cannot do it,” Guardiola said. And perhaps that, for Kyle Walker, would have been that, the beginning of the end, a player whose time at Manchester City was ended by a tactical shift that rendered him redundant.
Since then, however, Walker has started four of City’s last five games and subdued Gabriel Martinelli in a title decider. In the other biggest match of City’s season so far, he could be the specialist selected for another unenviable task: halting Vinicius Junior, the scorer in last season’s Champions League final, the scourge of Trent Alexander-Arnold.
