Title Being a Procession Should Not Detract from City and Guardiola's Brilliance

There is always a natural sense of anti-climax when a title race becomes a procession. While it is a truth universally acknowledged that football and inevitability make for staid bedfellows, it would be a shame if Manchester City's canter to the Premier League crown becomes a dissection of their rivals' shortcomings.

It should be a celebration of how Pep Guardiola has added Manchester, England, to a list of footballing utopias he has previously been the architect of in Spain and Germany.

On Sunday, as Bernardo Silva's goal eased City to a 14th successive home victory in the Premier League to move 18 points clear at the top of the table and within four wins of the title, all everyone wanted to talk about was how diabolical Chelsea were. Rewind a week, in the wake of City winning the Carabao Cup in no little style, all everyone wanted to talk about was how diabolical Arsenal were. 

For all the noise, we should be used to Premier League processions. The only title race in the previous six seasons that wouldn't be on iffy ground in terms of the Trade Description Act would be Manchester City sneaking past Liverpool in 2013/14.

City have form. Before that, Sergio Aguero scoring that goal against Queens Park Rangers was the last time it has genuinely gone down to the wire.

This time there will be no need for a photo finish, or God forbid VAR (after a long delay the trophy would probably be presented to Antonio Valencia).

The rest of the field is an irrelevance, reduced to little more than a number pinned to shorts. And that's fine. Intrigue is found less in studying how City compete against the opposition, but against themselves. How they push it in the absence of anyone to push against. City's current class should be enjoyed as Usain Bolt and Michael Johnson were enjoyed. In a league of one. 

Domestically, at least, the temptation could have been for City to ease off. Instead, as the finishing line comes into focus, they have taken the bend with all the guileful elegance of Johnson, with the rest of the field powerless but to admire how they shift out of view without breaking sweat. 

City now need 12 points from their remaining nine games to wrap up the league, with the possibility of doing it against Manchester United at the Etihad Stadium on April 7 a real one. Six wins from nine would see them break Chelsea's points record of 95 from 2004/05, while eight would take them past 100 points. A further 17 goals are required to chalk up a century.

Even that probably wouldn't be enough to quell football's unique predilection to obsess over the losers as much as the winners, if not more so. Guardiola will be lifting the trophy while we ignore him to write withered features on where Jose Mourinho has fallen short.

Adopting a bad news is good news approach has, and always will be, the currency that dictates the back pages just as it does the front ones. A morose Arsene Wenger, or an enraged Antonio Conte, will always be a more arresting image than a jubilant Guardiola.

Still, to watch this Manchester City side in full flow and choose to focus on the inadequacies of the opposition seems a little like dating Marilyn Monroe and not being able to get past the earrings she sports.

On Sky Sports, Jamie Redknapp described Chelsea's performance as "anti-football," while Gary Neville settled for repeatedly deeming it "embarrassing."

Conte, when informed of the comments, said, per the Guardian's Jamie Jackson:

"The pundit has to use the head to understand when you speak about tactics. I think you must have knowledge to speak about tactics and not only to speak in a stupid way. You have to accept every criticism but I am not so stupid to play against Manchester City open and to lose 3-0 or 4-0.

"If I remember well, Arsenal played twice against them and then you (media) criticise a lot (Arsene) Wenger because they concede three goals in only 30 minutes."

You can take the Italian out of Italy etc., etc.…

In fairness, Chelsea's players were literally walking for significant spells of the game. It really was remarkable stuff, for all of the wrong reasons. 

When the computer charged with generating the Premier League fixture list spat out Manchester City versus Chelsea for March, it would have done so with a wink—the champions paired with the team most likely to usurp them, with 10 games remaining.

It should have been a defining game of the season. Alas, it will only likely be defining in helping to determine Conte's long-term job prospects. In truth, the game itself was an advert for taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the snow and sleet.

While City were not at their most fluid in an attacking sense, they were so in control and dominant in possession it barely came as a surprise to learn the 902 passes they completed represented a Premier League record.

At the hub of much of their best work was the human metronome Ilkay Gundogan. The German made 174 passes, completing 167 of them. It was one of two records he set on the day.

On the type of afternoon Opta was made for, the German's omnipresence in the centre of the pitch saw him record 181 touches, to take another personal gong from a match he described as "not spectacular" on social media.

One suspects Guardiola adjudged his midfield pivot's performance to have been nothing less. Ahead of him, David Silva in assisting his namesake's winner gave another masterclass sent from heaven.

The slaloming Leroy Sane was equally as beguiling. Aptly, the German is fast becoming one of City's two or three most important players, with his performance again illuminating how when in full flow he is one of the most edifying sights in European football.

His sublime touch and turn in the first half when he beat Thibaut Courtois, only to see his shot cleared off the line by Cesar Azpilicueta, was the game's outstanding moment. Appropriately, given the weather, it's as though he's equipped with skis as he glides across the surface, while any full-back posed with trying to stop him invariably ends up looking as if trying to negotiate a snow-capped mountain wearing slippers. 

In the absence of the unwell N'Golo Kante, who according to Sky Sports commentator Martin Tyler spent the game lying down on Chelsea's coach (as opposed to his teammates, who settled for lying down on City's pitch), Cesc Fabregas and Danny Drinkwater looked like a pair who had only previously started together twice before. Between them they completed 75 passes. It's safe to say neither are big fans of the high press.

As an aside, if Conte really is desperate for the extra spending power he keeps banging on about (Chelsea's board may justifiably point to the £70 million worth of strikers left on the bench), he should have been more proactive and sold advertising space on the soles of his players' boots, just as former heavyweight Julius Francis did in 2000 when he stepped into a ring with Mike Tyson. It definitely wasn't just Kante sparked out on his back for 90 minutes.

The gap of 15 points that separated Chelsea from City last term has now been reversed to the extent Conte's side left Manchester 25 points in their host's wake, representing a staggering 40 point swing season on season. Chelsea are as close to Southampton in 17th as they are to City. They were certainly set up as if 17th, as though the central motivation was to ensure their goal difference did not take a battering.

When in the buildup to the game Guardiola had described his Italian counterpart as a tactical master, per Sky Sports, it is likely his thinking will have been influenced by how last season Conte's Chelsea inflicted on City the only home defeat of his tenure so far. A classic counter-attacking performance that was as aggressive as it was controlled could not have been further from Sunday's display.

As much as anything, for Chelsea, it looked as if they were set up to walk through how they are planning to play against Barcelona in the second leg of their UEFA Champions League tie at the Camp Nou.

Over 90 minutes, Chelsea failed to register a shot on target. In the first half, they failed to have a shot at all—the only time that has ever happened to them since such stats were first logged back in 2003/04. Marcos Alonso steering one a yard or so wide in injury time was as good as it got.

They were insipid to the point in the first half even a hint of attacking intent drew ironic applause from the away end. Probably from Eden Hazard, too, at least in his head. The Belgian was employed as a false nine on the day and seemingly took his job title literally. In the first 40 minutes, he touched the ball eight times.

Conte's decision to seemingly use the robust yet far from subtle centre-half Antonio Rudiger as his chief playmaker was majestically encapsulated just past the half hour mark, when after taking possession 15 yards outside of his own box, he looked up, weighed up his options, and launched a 90-yard pass straight to Ederson in City's goal.

If looks really could kill, then Hazard, at the time ambling near halfway with all the urgency of a post office queue, would have been taken into custody when he was eventually replaced in the 89th minute.

In eight games against the "big six" this season, City have won seven of them, scoring 22 in the process and conceding just six. With nine games left to play, a 14th consecutive win at home has seen them equal last season's points tally already. They really are doing something special. Records are tumbling with each passing game.

Earlier in the week, Guardiola had warned, per the Guardian's Paul Wilson: "We cannot think we are perfect. You always have to have something to let the players know we are not good enough."

Listening to him trying to pick at City's imperfections has the whiff of when a supermodel on a chat show is trying to normalise herself by alluding to the fact she hates her hands, or her feet, or her back. Essentially the bits nobody else really notices. Those in the studio audience, and watching at home, surreptitiously sneak a glance at their digits and for a moment feel quietly better about themselves. At least until the next time they encounter a mirror.

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery was pontificating on aviation, or more precisely the construction of planes, when he arrived at his own definition of perfection: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." 

He could equally have been discussing Manchester City. On a literal level, over two seasons, City have taken away a goalkeeper that wasn't as good as he thought he was in Joe Hart, and one that wasn't as good as Guardiola thought he was in Claudio Bravo, taken away full-backs past their use-buy dates and eased out fan favourite Yaya Toure. Of those left, whom would any manager choose to take away?

Last season, at any point, it would have been possible to take away any number of excessive passes as City regularly overindulged in trying to score the perfect goal. Not so this term.

Guardiola's philosophy that goals should be built on a foundation of 15 quick passes in their infancy remains, but famed long-ball manager Dave Bassett would have been proud of Aguero's strike in the Carabao Cup final when he buried Bravo's long punt from back to front.

There is zero fat in this City squad. Against Chelsea, indeed over the past few weeks in several important games, City have coped without key players. Fernandinho, Raheem Sterling, John Stones, Vincent Kompany and Fabien Delph have all missed big matches.

The key is that those who have come in, as Aymeric Laporte and Oleksandr Zinchenko demonstrated on Sunday, have fitted seamlessly into a system designed to ensure the sum is always greater than the parts. After a slow-burning start, Bernardo Silva looks the player he was at Monaco, too.

To watch City on Sunday so delight their manager in doing exactly what he has asked of them—and in contrast observe Conte so agitated with his charges aping the weary resignation of one of his downbeat press conferences—was to recall the somewhat surprising recent words of Wenger. The Frenchman, to surmise, effectively said it was no longer possible to coach a side in one's image.

Wenger said, per The Independent's Jack Pitt-Brooke: "As managers, we impulse our philosophy. But I think this game belongs to the players, because the importance of the players has become bigger than ever before, because the regroupment of the best players in very small numbers of teams."

When you see the way City's players move, in unison, as together as birds in migration, with full-backs bombing on like a Porsche on the outside lane making headway on a congested motorway, midfielders making angles for passes as though human protractors and strikers darting through and into spaces only they know are there, it would be hopelessly remiss to conclude this is just brilliantly intuitive—as though a form of jazz that somehow is simultaneously free but still perfectly measured. 

Nonsense. It helps when you have cherry-picked graduates from football's MENSA finishing school, but this is wholly Guardiola's vision.

It's the Catalan who fine-tunes the equations like Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting, who looked at Aguero and greedily thought "I want more," and is getting it, who has improved Sterling and Stones immeasurably, who has turned Nicolas Otamendi from a laughing stock to one of the league's standout defenders, who has teased out of Kevin De Bruyne a consistency that has elevated him to be the best midfielder in Europe, who has laughed in the face of us that thought England was different to the other leagues he has made his own.

More than anything, it is Guardiola who is the meticulous master on the training ground, who drills into his players where to move and how to think. To suggest we are witnessing, as Wenger suggests, football of such compelling spectacle largely because of the whim of City's players is like putting Garry Kasparov's prowess as a chess grandmaster down to sterling work on the part of his pawns and bishops. 


The accusation has long since been Wenger is no longer capable of building a side in his own image. However, at Brighton earlier in the afternoon, Arsenal looked exactly like their manager: sad, done, weary, motionless, emotionless, deflated, finished, broken, kaput. Dorian Gray wants his portrait back. 

Similarly, this Manchester City team could not be more Guardiola's doppelganger if they collectively shaved their heads and sported a couple of days' worth of stubble.  

And that's all the club's owners will have asked for when they brought him over to England two years ago. A side in Guardiola's image is something to behold.

Even if it means having to endure the odd procession as payback.

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