Premier League Hangover: First Blood to Guardiola in Manchester Turf Wars

Somehow the first Manchester Clasico just about lived up to the hype. For it to have justified fully a tsunami of coverage and a billing as both the Premier League's richest and most watched game ever, it would have needed to eclipse the 1970 World Cup final between Brazil and Italy—only with both sides being Brazil.

It was a little short of that but still good enough to sate gargantuan appetites and expectations from New York to Nairobi, Baghdad to Barnsley.

In October last year, the same two sides played out a goalless draw, managing just a solitary shot on target apiece. It is still available on prescription for insomniacs.

Only Jose Mourinho a curmudgeon of the highest order would have failed to have fallen at least a little in love with a contest of contrasting styles and egos that fluctuated between Manchester City's trying to crack a nut by coaxing it out of its shell to Manchester United's taking a sledgehammer to it.

Pep Guardiola might hate himself for it, but he will have—or at least should have—enjoyed City's stoic second-half display as much as he did their sublime first. Aleksandar Kolarov is still looking for a tooth lost in the battle; Marouane Fellaini is probably wearing it around his neck.

On a technical level, as United forlornly chased an equaliser by bombing the box in the second half, it was at times no better than adequate. Yet with each pass or directive from the touchline seemingly capable of sending the contest cascading in a new direction, as a viewer, it was as though the game had you by the privates and could take your breath away at will.

An international interlude had granted the game a prolonged buildup that felt more like those afforded to a heavyweight title fight than a football match. Not even a promoter of Don King's pernicious persuasion could have provoked either manager to engage in pre-fight, below-the-belt verbal sparring, though. The touchline embrace between Mourinho and Guardiola similarly stayed true to a pact to keep relations professional rather personal while the pair reside in Manchester.

Thankfully we were also spared a pre-match weigh-in in which both would have been reduced to their smalls, with only a well-positioned club badge preserving respective modesties. No scales were required to determine this was the heaviest of heavyweight bouts.

For 42 minutes, Manchester United looked like Muhammad Ali taking a pummeling from George Foreman in a Zaire jungle back in 1974. This was no tactical master plan though, as goals from Kevin De Bruyne and Kelechi Iheanacho ensured they felt the cold slap of canvas before they had thrown—let alone registered—a punch of their own. Mourinho was rumbled, and he had the indignity of having to interrupt his half-time harangue to help the club's medical staff apply antiseptic cream to rope burns suffered to the backs of most of his players.

In an interview with Sky Sports just before kick-off, Mourinho had seemed positively chipper. Having resembled a vagabond in an ill-fitting tracksuit in his final days at Chelsea, he's now back to being the debonair silver fox who could reduce your mother to a smitten wreck with a wink, as opposed to have her call the police.

When quizzed on his thinking behind what would prove to be a fatally flawed decision to give first Premier League starts of the season to Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Jesse Lingard, he didn't quite goad Guardiola, but he definitely jutted his chin out a fraction.

In explaining his hope that City's manager would push his full-backs into midfield—as has been a predilection in several of the Spaniard's handful of games in charge to date—it was an uncharacteristically candid insight. Ultimately it was one that bore fruit only of the rotten variety.

If anything, Guardiola will take it as a compliment that Mourinho shaped his side's personnel with City's in mind. He certainly didn't make any similar concessions.

"Sometimes players disappoint managers," was Mourinho's withered assessment at full-time, when asked by Sky Sports of the changes he had made to his starting XI.

Turtles taking a stroll past Singapore soup restaurants have been known to retreat into their shell less than Mkhitaryan. Unquestionably the talented Armenian will have better days in a United shirt; he'd struggle to have any worse having given the ball away a remarkable 13 times in 45 minutes. Lingard was no better.

Marcus Rashford, once more a beacon of blissful exuberance that somehow makes you feel young and old all at once when watching him, did more in his first five minutes as a second-half substitute than the pair managed between them in the opening period.

"Everything around the derby, the focus, the attention, some of the guys felt it," Mourinho said, per the Guardian. "It's nothing to do with experience or age. We had the kid [Rashford] on in the second half and he looks like he's playing for the under-18s against Salford City."

If it's not about age or experience, Rashford should be starting.

Guardiola elected to challenge the conventions of a traditional back four only in having John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi alternate in stepping into midfield, with Bacary Sagna and Kolarov charged with the humdrum tasks of an everyday full-back like any other.

Spotting when a Guardiola defender moves into midfield has become the Premier League equivalent of visiting a safari park and feeling compelled to scream out whenever a new species is spied on the horizon. Claudio Bravo's positioning himself near the centre circle when his team-mates prepared to take an attacking set piece was like coming face-to-face with a polar bear in a desert.

United's players seemed similarly disorientated. With City stitching together passes with the precision of a Savile Row master tailor, United looked as if they were not sure whether to match their opponents and press high or drop off and play on the counter. To the chagrin of an irascible Mourinho, they did neither, seemingly caught between the devil and sky-blue sea.

Ultimately, Mourinho has to take responsibility for changing an attacking front four that had won its previous three games. The allure of springing a surprise on Guardiola that would have been lauded a stroke of genius had it come off brings to mind the Oscar Wilde quote: "I can resist everything except temptation." And one's ego, it seems.

The limitations of some of United's players who have looked different entities since having a manager of Mourinho's stature believe in them were brutally exposed. David Silva and his band of equally nimble-footed brethren danced around Daley Blind, Antonio Valencia, Lingard and Fellaini to leave United's nearly-but-not-quite-good-enough men looking like the cast of The Full Monty asked to do a number with the Royal Ballet.

With a lovely fluidity of movement between the lines United could never quite get to grips with, the away side soon cottoned on to the fact they had caught their hosts cold. City bossed the ball, but no one could accuse them of indulging in sterile possession in front of United. Instead, unusually for a Guardiola side, en route to goal City seemed happy to follow the path of least resistance.

City's first goal started at Bravo's fabled feet. With a five-yard pass that will have had Guardiola disciples fetching for cold flannels, he knocked the ball to Kolarov, who proceeded to launch it up field in the direction of Iheanacho.

From here, Eric Bailly committed the first error in a three-part defensive horror story for United. For the first time this season, the Ivorian was found wanting in being caught out of position, and he then failed to even compete in an aerial challenge with Iheanacho. Paul Pogba, on the day a faulty light bulb only occasionally flickering into life, committed an act of criminal ill-discipline in letting De Bruyne run beyond him.

Blind was so deep and flat-footed that Mauricio Pochettino will have felt better about the way he defended Michael Owen's goal for England against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, as he allowed City's running man to nick the ball past him.

De Bruyne then gave David De Gea the eyes to finish like a man determined to show that at £57 million he represents quite the bargain in today's market. In 46 games for City, he has been directly involved in 32 goals (17 goals, 15 assists).

It's hard not to admire him. Jose, are you there?

If we could all put the weekend's hottest heat map (Bravo, Claudio) down for just a second, this was a goal so English in its construction it should have been accompanied by a jug of gravy. All of which will have infuriated Mourinho, given he had spent the week telling anyone who would listen he wanted his team of giants to bully a side about as diminutive as it gets in the Premier League. Ken Dodd is missing a number of his Diddymen, and he's not happy.

An evasive presence all afternoon, De Bruyne made City's second goal too. After Raheem Sterling's dribble to the jugular had left United's back line horribly out of shape, the ball broke to the Belgian. After fashioning a yard all too easily to work the ball onto his left foot—with Blind again at fault—he engineered enough purchase with little back lift to send the ball against De Gea's far post. It left Iheanacho, only playing due to Sergio Aguero's suspension, with the simple task of steering into an empty goal.

Iheanacho became the youngest City goalscorer in a Manchester derby at 19 years and 243 days, having now scored nine goals in just eight Premier League starts. Not bad considering he's only had 13 shots on target in the whole of his top-flight career.

As thoughts turned to 2011 when City scored six at Old Trafford, the solitary blot on an otherwise immaculate first-half copybook for the visitors arrived shortly before half-time.

Bravo's nadir on the most imperfect of debuts saw him come off his line to attack a floated Wayne Rooney free-kick, only to get Stones caught beneath him as he proceeded to drop it. It fell to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and with a majestically controlled technique from a stationary position, he lashed a volley into the unguarded goal.

It was not a dissimilar finish to Eric Cantona's winning goal against Liverpool in the 1996 FA Cup final. Come to think of it, it's not hard to draw similarities between Bravo and David James. Saturday was the first time Ibrahimovic had scored in a home league game and lost since Fiorentina beat AC Milan in 2012.

Had he demonstrated better spatial awareness, United would have been level by the interval. On the balance of play it would have been a travesty, such was City's dominance. Bravo and Sagna got in a mix-up to allow Lingard to nip in and present the Swede with a gilt-edged opportunity, only for him to shoot hurriedly before he had set himself as Stones cleared off the line comfortably.

The Chilean was then involved in the game's most contentious moment when he made a horrible mess of a Stones back pass. A poor first touch turned him into trouble and, with his foot off the floor, he launched himself into a challenge with Rooney. Reckless and dangerous, it was not just United's captain and Mourinho who felt referee Mark Clattenburg was badly at fault in failing to award a penalty and a red card.

All of which is a shame as reports had suggested Clattenburg had planned to get a Manchester Ship Canal tattoo, to go alongside the UEFA Champions League and European Championship trophies he had inked to commemorate the finals he won officiated.

Throughout, Bravo flapped like a pair of trousers hung on a washing line in a gale whenever the ball went anywhere near his box. Rather than hang him out to dry at full-time, Guardiola gave a defence of his goalkeeper so one-eyed a local Cyclops asked if he could borrow the Spaniard's other one if he wasn't using it.

"Claudio had one of the best performances I have ever seen," was his summary on Sky Sports. It appears the random drug-testers never reached City's dressing room.

If Bravo completes a catch against Bournemouth next weekend, I'm fully expecting a love sonnet in rhyming couplets.

It is unlikely Bravo has picked up over 100 caps and enjoyed a trophy-laden stint at Barcelona on the back of not being able to use his hands, but after a debut like that it's probably best to adopt the stiff British upper lip and say nothing.

De Gea looked like a child who had won a competition to play in goal for United in his first few months at Old Trafford, so only fools rush in with snap judgments.

In a Torino bar, Joe Hart gave a booming assessment of the man he had been jettisoned for, before launching into an impromptu version of God Save the Queen to the bemusement of the regulars. Bravos were not forthcoming.

On Sunday, Hart proceeded to have a Torino debut to forget, so it's as you were. 

Mourinho thought United should have been awarded another penalty when the ball struck the back of Otamendi's arm in the penalty area. Guardiola would have been incensed had it been given. 

It would have been even harder on Otamendi, who earned special praise from his manager at full-time. Often lumped together with the shipped-out Eliaquim Mangala (a man who throughout his City career has looked about as steady as a pony shoved in a barrel rolling down a hill), Otamendi was magnificent on Saturday.

He will have earned extra bonus points with Guardiola for a pass-completion rate of 91 per cent, which will no doubt have impressed him more than five tackles, six interceptions and five clearances. For one day only then, Otamendi was the iron first in the velvet glove.

Kudos, too, must go to the equally maligned Fernando. Brought on for Iheanacho as Guardiola looked to wrestle the ascendancy back from United midway through the second half, the Brazilian put in a defensively astute and game-shaping performance that will have surprised those who had earmarked him to be one of the first passengers on the Guardiola Express out of Manchester.

At the game's death, Bravo still had time to nearly chuck another in, but not before Ibrahimovic had hit about 12 volleys over, a Zlatan/Rashford hybrid had been chalked out for offside, Leroy Sane had made a lively debut for City, De Bruyne had struck the base of De Gea's near post and the equally impressive Fernandinho had gone close with a header.

After a fortnight of exhaustive-to-the-point-of-being-exhausting hype, perhaps it's best to conclude on a more sobering note.

The next installment of the Manchester Clasico isn't until February 25, 2017.

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