Welcome back then, Manchester City. We’ve been expecting you. Although on this performance there is still more to come, a knot of tension in City’s game seemed finally to be passing towards the end of this 3-1 defeat of Arsenal.
At a cold, still Etihad Stadium City were fretful when the game was in the balance. There is something engrossing about watching a team that plays smooth, beautifully grooved football playing smooth, beautifully grooved football badly. Not to mention something mysterious about their periods of scratchy form, the way the same group of brilliantly skilled players can suddenly lose their nip and speed and certainty.
If anything is to stop City from pushing Liverpool to the end in the title race, it will surely be this: tension, angst, a tightening of the nerves.
Pep Guardiola has a way of working, a way of being around a club that has tended to bleed away his own strength, the flip-side of all that micro-detailed coaching. One wondered about this here, just how hard this job worries away at City’s manager. Guardiola spent the first half rushing out to the edge of his rectangle, grey woollen hoodie zipped to the neck, in a state of constant foot-stamping outrage.
On days like these he is football’s version of the helicopter parent, the parent who just cannot stop himself intervening, micro-managing, offering both praise and arm-whirling gasps of horror.
The story goes that Brian Clough would occasionally present his players with a football and say: there it is go and play with it. It seems safe to say Guardiola would rather gnaw his own arm off than allow such lassitude.
Even then he would probably instruct his players to watch him gnawing his own arm, as a lesson in how to get arm-gnawing exactly right. Tension comes from many places. It is tension that has flooded into City’s play in the difficult moments.
Thank heavens, in that case, for Sergio Agüero, who will take the headlines here after scoring all three City goals. No doubt there will be those who point out that all three came via a cross from the same left flank, converted from inside the six-yard box by the custard-rinse shark, the last with the help of his elbow.
In addition Arsenal started here with Stephan Lichtsteiner in that right-back spot, an elite professional athlete whose time in England has made him a poster boy for clogging, sprint-averse, middle-aged park football right-backs everywhere.
But then, this is the way City attack, picking away at weak spots, overloading where an opponent is exposed. It is how Agüero works too. His hat-trick made it eight goals in his last eight games for a striker who was not Pep’s own first choice but who remains the master of this modern City era, a pure cutting edge whoever happens to be in the dugout. Who knows, if he keeps on scoring like this he might even get in the Premier League team of the season.
If Agüero settled this game, it was the spectacle of another City player and his interaction with Guardiola on the touchline that kept catching the eye. What is eating Kevin? Once again Kevin De Bruyne, the Premier League’s best all-round midfielder, was a little ragged and wild. There were some heavy fouls and misplaced passes, some frantic runs down the right that spoke of a man in a mild state of desperation to drive this team on.
Inspiration came from elsewhere this time, not least in Ilkay Gündogan’s lovely floated pass over the top to make the second goal, and in Raheem Sterling’s incision on the left. But City have missed the best of De Bruyne in recent times, the one who racked up 17 assists in five months between September 2017 and February last year and who offers City a vital note of variation, some other way to play when the tone becomes nagging and wheedling, a team getting lost in its own intricacies.
De Bruyne played in those recent City defeats, but he was not fit and was not himself. He has twice seemed to come back too soon from injury. At times here he looked like a player struggling through fog, occasionally finding clear air. There is a tension there. Tension seems to be City’s vice, the element clouding their game in a season as tight as this. As De Bruyne misplaced a few early passes Guardiola could be seen performing elaborate windscreen wiper gestures, describing strange shapes in the air, as though trying to re-draw the patterns of City’s attack.
Later on Bernardo Silva ballooned a first-time side-foot finish high over the bar. On his touchline Guardiola hopped and whirled and slapped his forehead. Bernardo looked across and caught his eye sadly and Guardiola gave a told-you-so wave of the hand. In that moment one got a weird glimpse into the intensity of his coaching, a vague little flash that manager and player really have sat down and discussed the percentage efficiency of the side-foot first-time finish from a left-wing cross, and “Bernardo, you know we’ve talked about this, come on now.”
As Sterling and Agüero nudged City ahead they did begin to cruise. De Bruyne still played with a little anger but by the time he came off, after a game of five shots and five fouls, something did seem to have passed.
By the end even Guardiola was strolling about, cardigan daringly unzipped, a man gamely pretending to enjoy himself, or at least to be something other than completely frazzled by the experience of managing this fine-boned champion team. If City are to press Liverpool all the way in the league, they will need De Bruyne to settle and for that tension, whatever its source, to pass.