And with that, surely, Manchester City’s title race was run. Only the most astonishing of all collapses, Kevin Keegan riding Devon Loch across the line of every Greg Norman putt at Augusta – or possibly Leicester City – can stop Liverpool now. Jürgen Klopp’s side can go off to Qatar for the Club World Cup and play the eight games in 19 days that the schedule absurdly demands of them not only with a cushion but in the knowledge that the champions are fallible.
That was said of City last season as well, of course, when away at Newcastle they lost a fourth game of the season at the end of January.
They responded by winning their 14 remaining matches to lift the title. Defeat in the Manchester derby on Saturday means City have now dropped as many points this season as they did in the whole of the last campaign. They would have to win their remaining 22 games to match their tally of 98 points – and given how Liverpool are playing, even that might not be enough.
Pep Guardiola knows that. He has as good as ceded defeat, something evident not only in his direct statements that it will be almost impossible to catch Liverpool, but also in his comments a couple of weeks ago about how unhealthy it is if a society values only winners.
He’s right, of course, but it’s a strange sentiment to hear from the mouth of a football manager, particularly one as driven as him. It’s the kind of thing you usually hear from managers in their dotage, when the flame is weakening or the money has begun to dry up: Arsène Wenger and Brian Clough became notably more concerned about how the game was played once they stopped winning trophies.
Not that anybody is suggesting Guardiola, at 48, is nearing the end.
City are third in the league, averaging two points a game and are the division’s top scorers. They’re still in the Champions League, the prize you suspect they’ve really wanted for the past couple of seasons – at least in terms of the board, coaching staff and players, if not the fans. This is not in any normal sense a crisis but such things are relative and through the mattresses of glorious football, the princess is feeling the pea.
This will probably be the third of Guardiola’s 11 seasons as a manager in which he has not won the league. For all that he has always been at enormously wealthy clubs, to do that across three different leagues makes him uniquely consistent. Even if he never won anything again, he would merit his place near the top of the pantheon. Certain repeated flaws, though, are beginning to emerge.
There are external factors over which he has limited control. City have paid heavily for the failure to replace Vincent Kompany in the summer, a needless gamble exposed by the injury to Aymeric Laporte. It remains mystifying as well that despite spending £150m on left‑backs over the past three years, they still haven’t found anybody who convinces regularly in the position.
Kompany’s departure also leaves City short of on-field leadership, rendering them particularly vulnerable to a recurring Guardiola trope: his teams have a tendency to concede goals in clusters, as Bayern did in Champions League semi-finals against both Real Madrid and Barcelona, and City did against Liverpool in both league and Champions League the season before last, and in the league against Leicester in 2016-17 and United in 2017-18. On Saturday, United didn’t just score both their goals in the space of six minutes, but between the two goals Marcus Rashford hit the bar and put another good chance wide. It’s as though a team so supremely drilled cannot quite react, cannot right itself, when the mechanism begins to go awry. The club-wide tendency to blame officials and see conspiracy at every turn probably isn’t helpful in that regard.
And then there is the issue of longevity. Guardiola’s only season without the league at Barcelona was his fourth and last. His third and final season at Bayern was his poorest. Familiarity breeds weariness in any squad under any manager, particularly when the summit has already been attained and the challenge is to remain there, when the excitement and sense of purpose of ascending to new heights is gone.
All managers struggle with the entropy of familiarity and, as his Bayern players acknowledged, Guardiola’s intensity wears people down.
Numerous managers who employ a hard-pressing game – Klopp at Dortmund, Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham, Marcelo Bielsa pretty much everywhere he’s managed – have found that when players become exhausted, physically, mentally and emotionally, the downturn can be dramatic.
City are not there yet and their situation is far from irretrievable but this season they have pressed poorly – one of the reasons United were able to counter so effectively and so often – and have also missed numerous chances. An edge, a ruthlessness, is missing. City remain an excellent side but in the modern Premier League in which draw stings like a defeat, that is not enough and, with the gap to the top a barely credible 14 points, their focus must shift to Europe.
