As any of you who play that most frustrating of games will know, there will be times when your swing goes awry, whereupon well-meaning friends will offer you all sorts of tips about what you should be doing differently.

The result is usually information overload: with your head crowded by conflicting advice, the problem worsens and what should feel natural becomes forced.

The same principle applies to football. It is ultimately a relatively simple game, yet today’s armies of sports scientists, data analysts and coaches risk filling players’ heads with so many things that natural instinct is overridden.

At present, City look like a team that has had all individuality and flair knocked out of it and for whom the game has become an exercise in not doing anything spontaneous.

Against Portsmouth, City mostly resorted to hoofing the ball long, and when they did try to play, their passing was again dreadful. There was no momentum or drive and, aside from a brief spell after Matthias Kvistgaarden came on, no sustained effort to put the visitors’ defence under pressure.

Basically, it looked laboured when the game was crying out for some imagination from someone.

It was absolutely soul destroying to watch and sadly we are pretty much back at the point where Philippe Clement arrived to rescue City last season.

However, there is a major difference. In the first part of last season, City had looked shambolic and rudderless, but under Clement they looked focused, attractive to watch and always on the front foot. Yet against Pompey they were almost the diametric opposite of those things, which it is what makes this decline so hard to explain.

The quality of the past three years’ signings can certainly be questioned, but that does not explain why players who impressed after Christmas now look like shadows of their former selves. Responsibility for that decline must lie squarely in the dressing room.

Clement has made it very clear that he is a hard taskmaster, but sometimes the carrot is just as important as the stick. Players aren’t machines and there is a danger that an unremittingly draconian environment can result in a lack of freshness, of mind as much as of body.

The great Brian Clough was a master of being able to relax players between games but still get them fired up before they walked onto the pitch.

Those were different times, of course. Had sports scientists existed then, they would surely have been horrified when Clough had his players drink a case of Chablis at lunchtime before holding Liverpool to a goalless draw in the 1979 European Cup at Anfield that evening.

That’s clearly an extreme example, but Clough believed that keeping players under constant pressure eventually became counterproductive and harmed their performances.

Is that what has happened at City? I don’t know, but whatever lies behind their accelerating decline, one thing is increasingly clear: the players who would have run through brick walls for Clement last season no longer show the same desire.

At least before the international break, City looked good going forward, despite their defensive failings, but even that positive seems to have disappeared over the last couple of home games, with neither visiting keeper having to make a save of any significance.

How ironic that that coincides with the retirement of Teemu Pukki, a reminder of just how good that period between 2017 and 2021 was to be a City fan.

With City coming off six straight defeats and Charlton winless in eight, today’s game is hardly likely to be a classic, but another defeat is unthinkable.

We’ve been here before and no one wants to see the ugly scenes of last November, but fans are angry, and justifiably so.