TEAM NEWS
Pedro Porro is back for Saturday, and that is worth more than one line of team news
De Zerbi confirmed it himself after Anfield. Porro is fit, Porro is available, and Porro walks back into a side that has spent two games being asked to cope without him. Every outlet filed that under team news and moved on. I am going to spend a whole post on it, because it is the most useful thing anyone has told me all week.
Here is the honest part first, because I always do that. A muscular issue is not a knock you gamble with. Porro missed the last two matches and there will have been people inside and outside this club who wanted him back sooner than was sensible. He was not rushed. He now returns for a home league game rather than breaking down again in a cup tie we were always going to rotate for. That is not luck, that is a medical department and a manager doing their jobs properly, and nobody will write a word about it.
What was actually being asked of Archie Gray
In the meantime, a young player who came through as a midfielder was handed the right back slot at one of the hardest away grounds in England, and the reviews afterwards decided to grade him on his attacking output. Think about how unserious that is. He was covering a specialist position, out of his natural role, against Liverpool, in a competition we went into with a rotated side. He held a shape he was not signed to hold. If your takeaway from that night was that he did not create enough, you were not watching a football match, you were filling column inches.
You do not get to spend two weeks complaining that a stand-in is not a specialist, and then shrug when the specialist comes back.
Why it changes Saturday
We play Aston Villa at our place on Saturday lunchtime, and the last time we met them, at Villa Park in May, we won. Villa sit below us in the table and have lost three of their four league games. This is the fixture where a proper right back matters, because it is a game we will spend long spells trying to break down rather than survive. Porro gives that side of the pitch width, deliveries into the box and a set piece threat that has simply not been available. Whatever eleven starts on Saturday will be closer to the team De Zerbi actually planned to field than anything we have put out this season.
Nobody is going to build a preview around a full back returning from a two week absence. They will build it around the table. I have read both, and I know which one tells me more about Saturday.
Update, 24 September. Porro started against Villa and lasted nineteen minutes before a suspected hamstring problem took him off. De Zerbi's reaction to it, and the rest of a bad afternoon, is in my write-up of the 2-3 defeat.