MANY HAPPY RETURNS
CITY LIGHT UP A STERILE EXPERIENCE AT ETIHAD
FOOTBALL is back, then. Sort of.
City eased past Arsenal at the Etihad thanks to the excellent Kevin de Bruyne and the calamitous David Luiz.
That was the normal, and the rest was anything but. Pep Guardiola’s response when asked before the game what to expect began ‘not much.’ He was right. The players arrived silently at the ground in a convoy of cars and then played out a soulless game of football in front of an empty stadium filled only with those deemed essential enough to be there. It wasn’t just the abundance of face masks and social distancing that made the whole affair seem clinical, but the sense everybody present was there working.
Doing a job, yes, professional, yet there was no joy experienced for anyone in a sport that provokes such wonderfully raw emotions at its best.
The empty feeling was not helped by the bare stands surrounding the action.
City had done what they could to try and make it a less sterile atmosphere for the players. There were wraps all around the stands where the fans should have been and pitchside video screens shared moments of supporters watching the game from around the world.
City’s second goal summed up everything that was missing though.
There were no cheers when Riyad Mahrez won the penalty, the heartbeat music introduced to try and give VAR a sense of drama fell flat, and Luiz was allowed to walk around the touchline without any comments on his performance as he made his way for an early bath.
The still silence was most commonly punctuated by coaches trying to get their point across from the dugout, or players overreacting to fouls for the intended benefit of the referee.
It was better than nothing, and the scary financial implications of not finishing the season meant it
was always going to be finished as best as it could, but it felt anything but premier.
Some things can get better.
If the Manchester monsoon that arrived in time for kick-off may have allayed ground staff fears about keeping the pitch watered in these summer months, it also made it harder for two sets of players that last played three months ago to keep control of the football.
Other parts of the game are unlikely to improve, though, for as long as the sombre state of the world is reflected in the stadium shells across the Premier League.
The professional sport is back, and the matches will come thick and fast as the competitions are played to their conclusion, but the return of the game that everybody loves remains far away.