When did it become not just clear but utterly unavoidable that Manchester City were winning this game? And not just winning it but offering up the most refined of sporting strangulations?
Perhaps it was the moment on 25 minutes when Rob Holding came skittering out wildly, like a drop of water on a hot pan, as Kevin De Bruyne hared in behind him, a moment of total positional panic, when the game just seemed suddenly to fall apart in the face of that sky blue pressure.
Perhaps the unravelling only really came with the fourth goal, Erling Haaland’s first of a night when he was, frankly, a little frightening: brutally good, but also oddly playful in the middle of all that bruising pressure.
But it wasn’t quite that either. The unravelling started in the opening 10 minutes, the opening five, perhaps the first few seconds, when suddenly the air seemed to have been sucked out through the stadium roof, and Arsenal were already panting, whirling, trying to find space and time, a foothold in this thing.
By the end there was a completeness to this 4-1 defeat of City’s only serious competitors in the league this season.
Pep Guardiola’s teams have always been about control, about mastering the space, giving an opponent no air to breathe. This is surely the most bruising, concussive, hard-running version of that template to date. City are thrilling to watch, but not in the fluid, decorative fashion of previous iterations. They came here with a plan. And that plan was: we are simply going to run through you. And when you have the ball we’re going to run straight through you too.
From that opening sky-blue swarm, City took Arsenal into a horrible place here. They didn’t let them leave.
And as City zero in on that treble, it is probably time to ask those wider questions that are now nagging away behind the action. Is this team the best, the most relentless, the most brilliantly effective the Premier League has ever seen? Probably. But it also feels like something different too, a genuinely rare example of just how close this impossibly complex team sport is likely to get to a total physical and technical dominance.
Unbeatable is a silly word in sport. Sport is about play, variables, twists, a place where anyone can still beat anyone. But can they? Over seven years City have created such a startlingly high-grade intersection of talent, fitness, movement, chemistry, systems play.
On this run, with these players in this form, it isn’t really necessary for this City team to do anything exceptional or unusual to win, to be inspired, to find moments of grace. They just need to press play.
Previous versions may have offered some sense of jeopardy, a brittleness, gambles on overloads and space behind, the creative free jazz of playing without a recognised finisher. Those notes of awkwardness, compromises in the design, are no longer there. And here City produced something utterly gripping, and utterly dominant.
From the start there was a genuine crackle of event‑glamour around the Etihad. As the sun dipped below those vast swooping tubular stands, pitch‑side was crammed with faces making the scene, the basking lions of the NBC podium, the BT podium, the French TV guys, Rio and Graeme and Lee, over here the sadly underexposed Noel Gallagher in an army coat saying the things Noel Gallagher always says, and even the Premier League trophy itself looking luminous, showing off its curves in flattering neutral ribbons, here to take the air briefly before being whisked away beneath a blanket by its dedicated Swat team. Set rule No 1. Don’t make eye contact with the trophy.
From the first whistle City were brutal , in the most controlled way. This was the noncontact version of the reducer, the steamrollering, the strong-arm job. They pressed and harried and strangled every movement at source, turning the air sky blue, blocking the lines and the angles, taking away time, shaving seconds off every touch, forcing Arsenal to live right on the edge of their nerves.
Holding was charged here with the single most difficult job currently in world football, trying to make Haaland look human-scale, trying to stifle that irresistible blitz-football energy. Holding didn’t play badly and even scored Arsenal’s goal late on. He was just out of his element, an analogue machine being asked to exist in some brutally fast super‑fibre broadband whirl.
The first goal came from a Haaland turn and offload to De Bruyne, whose shot started outside the post and curled into the net off Aaron Ramsdale’s fingers.
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The second on the stroke of half-time was a delayed VAR award. The header from John Stones was precise, floated back across Ramsdale into the far corner in a falling arc, perhaps the most gentle moment of the half, a microsecond to draw breath. Haaland made another for De Bruyne in the second half.
And De Bruyne will take the headlines. He is so vital in this team, counterpoint to the machine-drilled perfection, the designated free radical. But this was above all a team performance that verged on a kind of perfection: physical, technical and tactical.
