Phoney war over, Blues

THE real test for Manchester City starts now — with Champions League matches followed closely by games against their biggest rivals.

So we will know far more about Pep Guardiola’s side on Saturday night than we do now.

First up are Shakhtar Donetsk tonight at the Etihad and then four days later comes a tough, tough trip to Stamford Bridge to face one of their two rivals — the other being Manchester United — for the title.

City have bagged 16 goals in their last three Premier League games and, with Kyle Walker and Benjamin Mendy, they are far better at the back than they were last season.

But I’m convinced it will be a low-scoring draw at the Bridge and that both Guardiola (above) and Chelsea counterpart Antonio Conte would sign for that now.

This is the real start of the season when players are getting into their groove, when the clocks are about to go back, when the weather is changing. And if City can prove in the coming weeks that they can keep clean sheets then we will know Guardiola is on to something special.

IF the Romelu Lukaku song had been sung about me then I don’t think I’d have minded but we live in different times than when I was a player.

That said, if someone says: ‘Look, it’s been a bit of fun but it’s time to move on,’ as the Manchester United striker has done, then maybe that’s just what we all need to do.

I hope the chant doesn’t become one of those songs that United fans sing purely because they have been instructed not to sing it. That’s when we’re in territory marked ‘messy.’ HAVING watched Jose Mourinho closely in the #Game4grenfell I no longer think anything he does is by accident.

So you can forget all that ‘I don’t know why I was sent off’ from the weekend, he’ll have known exactly what he was doing.

It was Mourinho living up to being the pantomime villain again and his way of showing his players that he was so incensed by their average performance at Southampton he didn’t mind getting sent off if he could get the message to them.