Familiarity inevitably breeds, if not contempt, then at least discernment. When Leicester won the Premier League what mattered was not how they had done it but merely that it had been done.
You could talk about the performances of N’Golo Kanté, Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez, pontificate about how Claudio Ranieri had developed Nigel Pearson’s side or dwell on the significance of the discovery of Richard III’s body under a car park, but fundamentally all that mattered was that they had defied the laws of football finance and logic and that they had done it. But as Manchester City edge towards a sixth title in seven years, the manner of the win feels important.
Once the who has ceased to be a mystery, the how is all we have. On the one hand this has been a classic City kick for the line. After the back-to-back draws against Liverpool and Arsenal as March turned into April, results that even at the time felt a missed opportunity for the challengers to open up clear water, City have won eight in a row, scoring 30 and conceding five.
If there was one moment that summed up that run, it came in the win over Wolves when within a minute of Hwang Hee-chan pulling one back to make it 3-1 and raise the vaguest possibility of a comeback Erling Haaland took a long pass from Phil Foden, stepped inside Max Kilman and bullied a shot into the top corner. It was simple, direct and brutally efficient and it admitted not a glimmer of hope for anybody else: don’t even think about taking this title from us, it said.
The oddity over the past few weeks is that there have been quite a few moments like that. What if Emi Martínez rather than Robin Olsen had played? What if Chris Wood or Murillo had taken their chances? What if City hadn’t been given that questionable early penalty against Wolves? What if Son Heung-min had scored that one-on-one on Tuesday?
Nottingham Forest created a higher xG in the first half against City than any other side had in the league this season; against Spurs, City created a lower xG in the first half than in any other league game this season. It sounds absurd to say it but even after they thrashed Wolves there was a sense City had not been entirely convincing. Haaland’s fourth killed the game and City had an extremely comfortable final half-hour but there were occasions early on when they looked vulnerable.
Most of this is ludicrous. City are unbeaten in 34 games in all competitions. They have won their past eight in the league by at least two goals. The past six weeks have been an emphatic assertion of pre-eminence. Even if they have won only two games against top-six teams, the talk with any other side would be of a crushing surge of form at just the right time.
But this is not any other side: it is City, the perennial champions, and so the discussion around them necessarily descends into nit-picking, just as somebody who dines in only the finest restaurants ends up quibbling about a filigree crack in the pastry or a marginal imbalance in a sauce when all the food is sensational.
But there is something slightly different about this City. The control that once characterised Guardiola sides is not there. They have been more vulnerable to breakaways this season; their counterpress is not functioning as well. Although their possession has remained almost unchanged at 65% (an enormous number in historical terms), they have not seemed as coherent as in past seasons.
Perhaps that’s another issue of familiarity: the tendency is to compare a team with its best self, but City have felt this season more reliant on brilliant individuals than in the past.
Haaland is the most obvious factor, his need for direct balls to make best use of his capacity to run in behind the opposition defence and his lack of engagement in midfield creating a tension with the classic Guardiola method. That has largely proved beneficial. He has scored nine goals in the eight-game winning run although his muted displays against Liverpool and Arsenal, as well as in the two legs of the Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid, inevitably raised questions. What does he do when he’s not scoring goals? When he has 27 in the league, it feels academic.
Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne and Stefan Ortega have had their moments, but the player who has stood out recently is Josko Gvardiol. As Guardiola noted last week, the Croat took time to settle, but he has excelled over the past couple of months, looking more composed positionally and contributing an unexpected five goals in his past eight games.
That he is playing at left-back suggests another major tweak to the familiar template. Where once Guardiola seemed to want to cram in as many midfielders as possible, then full-backs, his new favourite position is centre-back. Gvardiol, Nathan Aké, John Stones and Manuel Akanji have all played at full-back at various times this season, while Kyle Walker’s forward sallies in the first 20 minutes on Tuesday were a reminder how curtailed his surges have been this season; he frequently operates almost like a third central defender.
That has two major effects: City are bigger than previous Guardiola teams – the side that started at Spurs on Tuesday was an average two inches taller a man than the Barcelona XI that began the 2011 Champions League final – and the setup to form the classic 3-2 defensive shape to prevent a counter should, at least in theory, be more straightforward.
Often managers lapse into self-parody as they enter the later parts of their careers, becoming increasingly inflexible versions of themselves. It happened to Brian Clough, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho. Guardiola’s evolution, by contrast, seems to have been to make City a less guardiolista side.
As much as anything, it may be that sense of not quite matching previous stylistic templates that makes this present generation, for all their obvious excellence, seem a little underwhelming.
