You had to feel for Peterborough in a way. Make it through to the last 16 of the FA Cup for the first time in 36 years, bravely hold off one of the world’s best teams for an hour, and your reward? To get schooled by half a billion pounds’ worth of talent on your home turf.
But if the skilled resistance of Grant McCann’s team finally crumbled in the last half-hour, in many ways the real reward was simply to be here: in the shop window, live on primetime ITV, bumping Emmerdale off the schedules.
They will remember this evening at London Road for a long time; longer, at any rate, than Manchester City. It was a curiously scruffy evening for the champions, who naturally dominated possession but spent large periods struggling to create, gave up several good chances and only really lifted the siege later in the game.
Before all of that, however, there were some formalities to be dispensed with. It was in many ways a pre-match rich in symbolism, as Fernandinho poignantly handed over the captain’s armband to his Ukrainian teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko.
Peterborough, meanwhile, had prepared their own tribute, sending their club mascot – a human-sized rabbit named Peter Burrow – running around the pitch before kick‑off, bearing a Ukraine flag in one hand and swinging a giant carrot with the other. Of all the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, this was perhaps one that nobody saw coming.
The City fans gathering outside the cathedral from late afternoon had wasted no time in camping out in Peterborough territory, and nor did their team as soon as the game started. In a way, City did what they do with virtually all their opponents: they played as if they didn’t exist. Indeed you occasionally suspect that for Pep Guardiola the perfect game would involve no opposition at all, just a series of dizzying passing triangles wending their way across a deserted field, and ending in an emphatic Raheem Sterling tap-in at the back post.
Yet as Peterborough safely saw out the early stages and continued to hold out through the first half, as City passed and dribbled and crossed their way into a maze of their own making, it became clear that they were missing something. A creative spark. An outlet. Someone who can pick apart deep-set defences, beat a man and do the unexpected. What they were missing, above all, was Jack Grealish.
The catch was that Grealish had started the game and was already on the pitch, starting his first game in almost a month. But somehow his quiet opening felt analogous to his nascent City career, a man trying for all the world to prove that he is more than a bauble, an ornamentation on an already brilliant team, a £100m trimming. Earlier this season he admitted he had not been producing the goals and assists his price tag might suggest, a claim quickly rejected by Guardiola this week.
“Players today play for the statistics, but this is the biggest mistake,” Guardiola scoffed. “They say: ‘How many goals did I score, how many assists?’ This is the problem. These statistics never existed before.”
Notwithstanding the fact that goals and assists have been around for quite a while, there was a certain amount of truth there. Grealish isn’t simply there to put away chances; he’s there to draw defenders towards him, reel them in, create space. The problem isn’t so much what Grealish does with the ball; it’s getting the ball to him in the first place.
In the first phase, Guardiola wants his wingers to stay wide to stretch the defence. Now, obviously Grealish can do this. It’s just not his instinct. In his long career with Aston Villa and England, he has never really been in a position where his function is to sacrifice himself for other players.
His natural orientation is towards the centre. And so sometimes the runs are a little mistimed, the positioning a couple of yards off. The beauty of this City system is that players know each other’s movements so intricately that they can play the pass almost without looking up. For whatever reason, Grealish isn’t quite on that wavelength yet.
But obviously you stick with him. Because when he does get the ball, everything makes sense. Slowly he began to grow into the game, to sniff out the space, to tease and torment. It was his slipped pass to Phil Foden that created the deadlock-breaking goal for Riyad Mahrez, one of those passes played entirely on the off-beats, shuffled out of his feet like a card trick.
Seven minutes later, he finally had his statistic, bringing down Foden’s long ball with educated laces and finishing with a delicious flourish.
There were chances for more, but City’s work for the night was done. At full time the home fans rose in acclaim. Peter Burrow swung his big foam carrot around and around like a mace. Grealish strolled over to the away fans and accepted a warm ovation. It had been an evening of little victories, in more ways than one.
