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This has been a strange season for Manchester City. Every now and then, they’ve threatened to produce the sort of run that used to define them. They won eight games in a row from the end of November to the end of December, then six in a row in February. At which point the tendency has been for a sort of mental muscle memory to kick in and to think that, even if they haven’t been playing that well, even if this doesn’t look like the City sides of old, this is the start of one of those relentless bouts of form that has ground down challengers in the past. After all, some of those past runs began uncertainly.
But this is a very different City. Even Pep Guardiola sounded bemused after Saturday’s draw with West Ham, noting how “in the past always we found the way to win this kind of game … this season, the fact that we didn’t score goals for the amount of chances, it’s punished us”. He seemingly had no explanation for that, muttering about the “unfairness” of the world that his side had not got the results he feels their football has deserved.
City have been oddly patchy, even within games. As has been noted regularly, their second-half form is much worse than their first-half form: if games ended at half-time, they would have 68 points this season; if they started at half-time, just 42; as it is they have 61. Some of the wins in those streaks look less impressive close up: they were extremely fortunate, for instance, to beat Leeds at home and Fulham away after second-half collapses. Their draw at Tottenham, having been 2-0 up, felt freakish, and yet that sort of post-half-time slump has become characteristic. They were excellent in beating Newcastle 3-1 away in the FA Cup, yet in the game after that, away to Real Madrid in the Champions League, they were bafflingly open and exposed in midfield. Had Guardiola, for once, underthought things, been overambitious?
In the past six weeks, City have played each of the four sides battling to avoid the last relegation slot (assuming Wolves and Burnley do not produce something extraordinary) and have beaten only one of them, Leeds. Against Nottingham Forest and West Ham, the issue was an inability to convert possession into chances and chances into goals. Against Forest they won the shot count 24-9 and drew 2-2; against West Ham they had 24 shots to one and drew 1-1. Guardiola’s confusion is understandable – and yet the even goal they did score against West Ham was almost certainly a mis-hit cross; certainly the way Bernardo Silva looked at Erling Haaland before striking the ball and his subsequent sheepish glance at the bench implied he had not been trying the deft chip he ended up executing.
And as City have toiled, Arsenal have kept grinding out results. Each of their last five games have been tight, awkward affairs, but they’d won three of them by a single goal and drawn away to Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League before Saturday’s 2-0 win over Everton. For 89 minutes they were frustrated by a typically well-organised performance from David Moyes’s side, only for a rare error from Jordan Pickford to gift them a last-minute goal before Max Dowman’s gleeful run and finish into an empty net in injury-time, with every Everton player, including Pickford, up for a corner.
It’s probably still too early to suggest Arsenal have the title wrapped up: if City win their game in hand and beat Arsenal at the Etihad in a month, the gap is only three points and, on form, nobody can be convinced enough of Arsenal to be sure they will not drop points in one of their other six games. The issue for City, though, is that there is no reason to believe that they suddenly will start taking chances or put together a run consistent enough really to apply pressure.
Saturday, though, had the feel of a day that at the end of the season may be considered decisive, just as 18 January was pivotal last season. That day, Liverpool scored two injury-time goals to beat Brentford in a 3pm kick-off then, in the 5.30pm game, Arsenal threw away a two-goal lead to draw with Aston Villa. It had seemed Arsenal would close to within two points, but by the end of the day Liverpool’s lead was six with a game in hand; they were never really challenged after that.
With the Carabao Cup final, an international break and the sixth round of the FA Cup to come, Arsenal won’t play again in the league until 11 April. City aside, their remaining fixtures are not unduly daunting, although their biggest opponent may yet be their own doubt. For that to be a factor, though, would require City, for the first time this season, to find some consistency – and as yet there is little sign of that.
On this day …
Sheffield United against West Bromwich Albion, played on 16 March 2002, looked like a standard First Division game. The Blades were midtable and West Brom were pushing for promotion to the Premier League, the only suggestion that the game might become one of the most notorious in English history was the bad blood between United’s Georges Santos and West Brom’s Andy Johnson, the former having sustained an injury in a collision with the latter in a previous meeting.
Nine minutes in, the United keeper Simon Tracey was sent off for handling outside his box. Goals from Scott Dobie and Derek McInnes had given the away side a 2-0 lead when the United manager, Neil Warnock, brought on Santos and Patrick Suffo after 63 minutes. Within seconds, Santos had been sent off for an awful foul on Johnson, and Suffo dismissed for a head-butt in the melee that ensued. Dobie added a third goal and, with the game spinning out of control, Michael Brown and Robert Ullathorne were both injured, leaving United down to six men with eight minutes remaining, forcing an abandonment under Law 3, which stipulates that a game cannot continue if one side has fewer than seven players. The 3-0 result stood, United were fined £10,000 and neither Santos nor Suffo ever played for United again.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
