THERE MAY BE TROUBLE AHEAD
TREBLE City show it’s not all Champion football and they can dig in to win
ACCORDING to Pep Guardiola, his Manchester City team has only a 0.01 percent chance of repeating the Treble of last season.
Good luck finding a bookmaker who would give you odds to reflect that.
This was a performance of champions in a game that will last 0.01 seconds in the memory. Through Erling Haaland’s violent finishing, City found a way to win when they had forgotten how they normally play.
Yes, it is a bit of a cliché . . . but that is why this was a performance of champions.
Grinding it out, staying patient against opponents who, from a defensive point of view, could not have been better organised.
And, of course, it helps when you have Haaland and, just as crucially, Kevin De Bruyne.
By De Bruyne’s standards, his assist for Haaland’s second falls into the relatively mundane category but his mere arrival into proceedings after almost an hour of City struggle brought a fluency and threat to Guardiola’s team that had been almost absent.
Before Haaland smashed home his first with just under 20 minutes of regulation time remaining, the home support certainly needed lifting.
Because ahead of the rightfooted hammer blow, Everton had defended pretty immaculately. Sean Dyche might have been banished to the stands but this was an Everton performance that was unmistakably his.
But if this Everton defence does have a particular weakness, it probably lies in its set-piece operations and that is what led to the Haaland opener and to this defeat. If their legal defence has done a better job in whatever passes for a Premier League appeal court, Everton might get a decent result in a few days when the outcome of their appeal against the 10-point deduction will be announced.
But as the best-case scenario is probably for a reduction and, bearing in mind there is another charge to be heard, it is safe to assume the remainder of the season is going to be a relegation battle.
To win that battle, Dyche will have to increase his side’s attacking threat.
Defending as they did for well over an hour is fine but there was precious little for a strange City starting line-up to worry about.
And when a team does have a De Bruyne to enter the fray and a Haaland up top, the odds are stacked in their favour no matter how out-ofsorts they seem. And sure enough, those two combined for the second, Jarrad Branthwaite bouncing off Haaland when he really should have done better.
Everton are now winless in their last seven Premier League games and Dyche and his squad desperately need to regain some momentum.
Fixtures against Crystal Palace, Brighton and West Ham look relatively inviting but it is going to be a tough slog. For City, the slog will be in churning out victories – their speciality under Guardiola.
For a while here, Pep – presumably with one eye on Tuesday’s Champions League engagement in Copenhagen – looked like his own worst enemy, having started with Nathan Ake, John Stones, Ruben Dias, Manuel Akanji and Mattheus Nunes.
But when it did not work, he changed things fairly early in the second half. When you can change things by bringing on, arguably, the most creative midfield player in the game, you have a chance of putting things right.
And one thing is for sure . . . when you have De Bruyne and Haaland at your disposal, you have more than a 0.01 percent chance of winning another Treble.