Just before the hour in this match at the Etihad Stadium, Bernardo Silva took the ball on the right flank and began to drive inside, not so much sprinting as ambling urgently, like a man running a little late to deliver a lecture, scarf flapping absently over one shoulder.
Casually, more just to hold on to the ball, he nutmegged Alphonso Davies. Then he did something impossible, seeming somehow to walk through Davies’s legs in pursuit of the ball, reappearing on the other side of his man via some invisible hobbit tunnel.
