A white sky almost entirely leached of colour. A damp bite to the air. A general sense of unease around the Etihad. Could the last decade of Manchester City success be erased or tainted by an independent panel hearing the charges brought by the Premier League? Quite possibly, but in the here and now, after a straightforward win over Aston Villa, City will go top of the Premier League if they beat Arsenal at the Emirates on Wednesday.
Even in the wake of last Monday’s Premier League charges, it would be difficult to portray this as a defiant victory, a club under siege coming together in adversity. City were so superior, and so helped by Villa’s errors, that there was no immediate opponent to be defiant against.
City were impressive enough, but it’s not hard to be impressive against opponents who effectively give you three goals before half-time. Nobody marked one of the three vaguely tall City outfielders from an early corner, Calum Chambers turned a nothing through-ball into something threatening by inexplicably heading it away from Emiliano Martínez, and Jacob Ramsey responded to Jack Grealish’s repeated entreaties to clip his heel by clipping his heel. If this game does ever became part of future investigations, nobody could convincingly argue £1bn of investment made much difference: this was just Villa shooting themselves in the foot over and over again.
But one of the problems for City is that they cannot just live in the moment. The whole process by which they got to this point has been called into question. The mood at least was defiant, the atmosphere at kick-off far spikier than it often is at the Etihad. The Premier League anthem was booed in the way that the Uefa anthem is usually. There were chants in favour of Guardiola and, a natural development in the present environment, a banner supporting “Pannick on the streets of London”. A KC has probably never been hailed in such a way by fans before, but then no club has ever been in such need of a figure like Lord Pannick – and he is becoming a stalwart, having already represented them against Uefa and Joe Royle.
You wonder to what extent legal assistance will feature in future recruitment decisions. “Look, we can bring in a top, top barrister, but if we do, you’re probably going to have to lose a full-back.” Is this what modern fans dream of, these glorious victories at Wembley, at the Bernabéu, at the court of arbitration for sport? “Yes, we may have lost at Spurs, but our defence against an alleged breach of Premier League Rule B.13 was first rate.” Does anybody stop to think that something, somewhere, has perhaps gone awry?
Pep Guardiola’s press conference on Friday had suggested he at least does not share the confidence expressed by the club statement about the charges. As he railed against supposed conspiracies against his club, apparently unwilling to comprehend the difference between a charge and a conviction, and misrepresented the decision at the Cas that overturned the Champions League ban imposed by Uefa, he seemed to be appealing not merely to the baser elements of tribalism but also to be a man under pressure.
Which is understandable enough. City is his great project, a club built in his image, essentially from the ground up and, however innocent he may believe City to be, he is now faced with the prospect of seeing it all swept away for something that isn’t his fault; he wasn’t even at the club for the majority of the period the charges relate to. But the change of tone from his response to the Uefa charges is striking: then Guardiola insisted he would leave if it turned out the club lied to him; this time he insisted he was staying put come what may. He seems to have gone from seeing himself as a mere employee to an absolute identification with the club and its owners.
How significant that will be on the pitch is hard to say but Guardiola, even at the best of times, is an extremely intense man – that energy, that focus, is part of the reason for his enormous success – and City’s form had been wobbling. It may be that the sacrifice of João Cancelo turns out to have been the right decision pour encourager les autres, to ward off the complacency Guardiola said he had identified, but that it had to be made at all is telling. And this was one of those team selections, an unexpected 3-4-2-1, that might also have been regarded as a symptom had it gone awry. As it was, it never threatened to, the six midfielders dominating possession, Villa’s rally coming long after the game was done.
But for City with the independent commission in the distant future and Arsenal coming on Wednesday, beating Villa didn’t really seem like the major issue.
