Basically all I said is we need Cole to stop Navas, while Clichy will leave space on his own side. City are not naturally wide so we can squeeze them, although this will mean we're going to concede lots of possession centrally so we may be better off trying to widen the game so we can play more to our strength.
I think we can play well once we click although we need to sort out our central midfield. When Mourinho was last here we had Ballack, Lampard, Essien and Makelele plus Mikel. Bar Mikel, these were all top midfield players and some of the best in their position. I don't need to tell you how good Ballack was at keeping the ball and spraying it around, or how good Makelele was at disrupting opponents play and passing to Ballack/Lampard to start attacks. And I don't need to mention how good Essien was with his striding forward runs.
Although back then, we looked really flat mainly because of Robben's lack of game time from 2006 onwards. In his first 2 seasons, he helped us win the league because he and Duff offered pace with our solid midfield so we always looked dangerous. Then we became flat and Mourinho saw sense in Malouda (not bad mind, but not fit to tie Robben's laces imo). So for a good 5 years, we had no genuine wide fast players until Sturridge was put out there (til he was replaced by Kalou for RDM
). Now we finally have some good pace in attacking positions but the problem remains that since we've sold Makelele, Ballack and Deco (3-5 year time span), we have lacked the ability to control games. Our 2011-2012 CL knockout campaign strongly indicated this. At the Bridge, Benfica had a lot of the ball and we were heavily reliant on their awful defense. Next year in the Europa League, they had lots of the ball and we caught them out because they can't defend.
I'm pretty sure Mourinho is aware of our central midfield problem and will address this with necessary changes