Sane sets City on their way to leave them one win away from the title
It’s on! Ice the champagne. Get the banners ready. Print the T-shirts.
Manchester City can win the Premier League next Saturday.
Not only that, they can do it by beating neighbours United at the Etihad Stadium. Nothing could be sweeter.
And if they come anywhere near the level of this performance the title will be won with six matches to spare.
Pep Guardiola’s team have had an amazing season. And their 13th away win of the campaign – a club record – was one of the most impressive in a campaign of impressive displays.
They had the game won long before half-time. In fact, it was probably settled in the first 12 minutes when Leroy Sane and Gabriel Jesus engineered a two-goal lead.
If it wasn’t over then, it certainly was when Raheem Sterling scored the third seven minutes from the break.
Not only did Everton not have any answer, it didn’t even look as if they knew what the question was.
Sam Allardyce was once accused of getting his teams to play Victorian football.
Compared with the Guardiola version of the game, this was more like something from the Stone Age.
Big Sam’s basic old fashioned 4-4-2, with Wayne Rooney and Morgan Schneiderlin as the central midfielders, was completely overrun by fitter, younger, more skilful and more ambitious opponents.
At the interval City had registered 82 % possession – in an away game! It wasn’t possession for possession’s sake either. Every pass had a purpose.
As Everton had inflicted the heaviest league defeat of Guardiola’s entire career when they beat City 4-0 last season, it was a sensational response from the Catalan.
Considering they have the small matter of their Champions League quarter-final at Liverpool and then the United game in the next six days, it’s hardly a surprise that they took their feet off Everton’s throat just a little in the second period.
That allowed the Toffees to get a goal back through Yannick Bolasie
just after the hour mark, but it was never going to disrupt City’s dominance or their poise.
It took just four minutes for City to tee up next week’s Mancunian showdown.
Centre-back Aymeric Laporte, playing as an emergency left-back, found David Silva in the Everton box and his acrobatic pinpoint cross was volleyed brilliantly past Jordan Pickford by Sane.
Bolasie should have equalised for Everton seven minutes later, but headed over from close range after Dominic Calvert-lewin pulled the ball back from the bye-line.
It was to prove an expensive miss because 30 seconds later City had their second, a bullet header from Jesus from a cross by Kevin de Bruyne.
Had Silva’s angled shot not been deflected into the side-netting by Michael Keane it could have been three inside the first quarter-hour.
Leighton Baines curled a freekick just wide of the post, before Kyle Walker screwed a shot wide after a wonderful build-up involving Silva and Sane and Nicolas Otamendi struck a De Bryune corner narrowly off target.
Raheem Sterling’s drive was deflected over the bar and Silva had a diagonal cross-shot that flew past the upright.
Those two combined for the third after 37 minutes, with Silva sprinting clear down the left and Sterling ramming in from close range.
Fernandinho was denied a fourth 10 minutes into the second half by a decent save by Pickford after his 25-yard drive had taken a slight deflection.
Allardyce replaced Rooney with the fresh legs of Tom Davies and Everton got back into the game in the 62nd minute.
Bolasie picked up a pass from Calvert-lewin and drilled a shot through Kyle Walker, off the foot of one post, along the goal-line and in off the other.
It didn’t give Everton any realistic hope of rescuing the game, but at least it showed a bit of spirit and put a stop to the crowd’s increasing restlessness.
Fernandinho dipped a drive onto the top of Pickford’s net by then Guardiola’s players had finally decided they’d done enough and energy needed to be conserved.
By the end there were more empty blue seats around Goodison than there were occupied ones.
This place is known as the School of Science and those absent fans would have been only too aware of the gulf that now exists between these two clubs.