How Kyle Walker took his eye off the ball: Inside the muddled mind, £27million divorce battle and niggling injuries that have made Man City's captain a liability, revealed by JACK GAUGHAN

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Pep Guardiola's admission last week that Manchester City are punishing themselves when conspiring to lose most weeks signified a change in message.

He is a man who will fiercely defend his players. Stand by them through bewilderingly poor patches of form, stand by them in the face of public scandal. But to hear him openly talk about individual mistakes on the eve of the 2-0 defeat at Juventus offered a change of tack.

A man, like the rest of us, who had run out of all other logical reasons for the malaise. It was six defeats in nine at that point; after Sunday, it’s eight in 11.

Over the course of this wretched, tortured run, Guardiola hasn’t blamed individuals, believing that the mistakes are a result of more general deficiencies. Anxiety has seeped in, an uncertainty – plainly evident in the capitulation against Manchester United.

Looking at the footage of games since they lost at Bournemouth on November 2, it is reasonable to calculate that 16 errors have contributed to the opposition scoring.

The official statistics will not, however, paint such a bleak picture. Those figures will be in single digits, and that brings us to Kyle Walker. The leader of men within this group, voted twice to be given the captain’s armband.

Man City captain Kyle Walker has made a number of defensive errors in recent weeks

His struggles on the pitch come amid a £27m divorce battle with his wife Annie Kilner (left)

Pep Guardiola has put a lot of trust in Walker, but the right back is now becoming a liability

By the absolute definition of a defensive mistake, which Opta use, he has not committed any sins. Not a single one. Watching the goals back and using your eye, he’s played a leading role in five of them. It’s panto season and there’s a line that could easily be borrowed from those shows.

Playing Daniel Munoz onside at Crystal Palace. Caught underneath a corner for Maxence Lacroix to head in unopposed in the same game. A mix up with Ruben Dias at Liverpool. Allowing Timo Werner to race past him against Tottenham while playing chicken with the winger.

And, probably the most pointed example of his wider issues, came 24 hours after Guardiola spoke in Turin. Weston McKennie’s sweet volley put the Champions League tie beyond City and the visitors, on first glance, looked collectively exposed.

As McKennie slams past Ederson, Walker can be seen ambling back from the right back position – ending up at least five yards away from the moment of impact. McKennie had the whole penalty area to himself. The cross still went into a danger area but it’s a danger area you may expect your right back to occupy.

‘We’ve (always) run like a desperate team,’ Guardiola said last week, describing their hunger and desire. As McKennie wheeled away, that didn’t appear to be the case.

Walker is by no means the sole problem at City right now but is symptomatic of their ills. A captain who, sources say, has been playing with an injury for over a month – although Guardiola has not mentioned it during his media duties. A captain who, sources say, has become quiet and reserved around the training ground – and who flattered to deceive in a recent training game with the academy kids. A captain whose wife and mother of their four children, Annie Kilner, filed for divorce in October, and is reportedly fighting for half of his £27million fortune.

City have won 11 matches in all competitions this season and only two of those have come when Walker – like other internationals, afforded a period of managed rest at the start of the campaign - has started. One of them was Watford at home in the Carabao Cup.

They are grim numbers for one of the finest full backs ever to have graced the Premier League, a pillar of Guardiola’s various super teams. Plenty scoffed at the initial £45m fee City paid Tottenham in 2017 but the money has been paid back and then some.

Now though he is wearing that look becoming prevalent among City’s stars – a confused, contorted face of pain. He still has 18 months left to run on the three-year contract City dished out following the Treble, in a bid not to lose more experience after Ilkay Gundogan and Riyad Mahrez’s departures, yet his best days appear behind him.

Walker has been playing while not 100 per cent fit for the past month

He has been slow to react to dangerous situations, including for Weston McKennie's goal during City's defeat by Juventus last week

City rebuffed interest from the Saudi Pro League last summer, instead jettisoning Joao Cancelo for good. Of the two, Cancelo’s departure was significantly more pressing and Walker had recovered from some patchy form last term as they won a fourth straight title.

A few months on and here is a muddled mind. He suffered abhorrent racist abuse online in the wake of Juventus, sent on Instagram shortly after he’d left the stadium. He’s become the pin-up for mediocrity among some supporters, both match-going and those watching from afar, but that moved from criticism to prejudice. Walker branded it ‘unacceptable’ and he is absolutely right to highlight it.

Nobody can quite put their finger on what has happened to his game so quickly. At 21.9mph, his top speed this season is equal to what it was in in 2021, albeit almost 2mph shy of his record set in the Treble year. His 18.9 sprints per game are down on previous years but not really by any considerable margin. He’s been dribbled past by opponents 0.9 times a game, the same as 2023 but two-tenths more than last term.

The only metric way down is the interceptions per 90 minutes. That stands at 0.3, where he has generally average at around 0.8. Perhaps sharpness in the mind is actually more important than the legs.

Would a level-headed Walker ordinarily throw himself to the ground when brushed by Rasmus Hojlund in Sunday’s Manchester derby? Roy Keane suggested so on Sky Sports, yet there is no back catalogue of these frankly embarrassing and pathetic moments throughout a gilded career.

‘He’s better than that,’ Micah Richards said on Sky Sports. Keane replied: ‘Is he? I’m not so sure.’

On Dutch television, Frank de Boer went one further, with his employers tweeting that he’d ‘exploded’ after watching the melodrama. ‘If he watches that clip back, surely he can’t take himself seriously anymore?’ De Boer said. ‘It makes me furious. I find this ridiculous. And he even keeps lying on the ground. This is screwing up our game of football.’

Walker was one of the first City players down the tunnel after United’s improbable late show – again, owing to a catalogue of errors – and just hasn’t looked himself all season. Samir Nasri, the ex-City winger, suggested on Canal+ that ‘things off the pitch’ are affecting ‘the worst defensive season of his career’.

Punchy from Nasri, while also stating the bleeding obvious. Kilner filing for divorce is the latest development of a sordid home life, for which Walker has expressed remorse after fathering two children with Lauryn Goodman.

Their son was conceived while Walker – who had a string of misdemeanours during the pandemic, including hosting a sex party – was separated from Kilner.

Walker's muddled thinking may have contributed to him throwing himself to the floor after a confrontation with Rasmus Hojlund during the Manchester derby

Walker fell to the floor as he pretended he had been headbutted, but replays showed it was another embarrassing moment in a difficult season for the England international

Their baby daughter was not and the recent trial regarding child support ended with Judge Edward Hess ordering the England international to pay Goodman £1.8m to purchase a property in Sussex, plus more than £100,000 in additional fees. Walker is paying £12,500 a month in child maintenance. Goodman was labelled of possessing ‘insatiable greed’ by a spokesperson for Walker, accused of using him as an ‘open-ended chequebook’.

In the wake of Walker’s social media posts about being the victim of racism last week, Goodman responded in support while also claiming he has ‘abandoned’ his two children with her.

This is the backdrop to Walker’s season and with all that, it is little wonder his eye is off the ball. But the main mental attribute the 34-year-old has always had is that irrespective of what is going on behind the scenes – a complicated marriage, the Covid scandal, the public urination, the complaint of indecent exposure in a bar – he has always turned up for Guardiola and City.

He is not turning up at the moment. When a captain doesn’t turn up, it can have wider ramifications for those beneath him than merely a right back losing his man every so often.