Football: have Man City already won the league?

Officially, the Premier League season doesn’t end for another five months, said Daniel Taylor in The Guardian – but the title race is already over. At Old Trafford on Sunday, the “champions-inwaiting”, Manchester City, beat their arch-rivals Manchester United 2-1. It was the Blues’ 14th victory in a row – equalling a Premier League record – and it gave them an 11-point lead over second-placed United. They celebrated like a team that had just won the league, infuriating the United manager, José Mourinho, and setting off a fracas between the sides. City’s dominance was staggering, said Jason Burt in The Daily Telegraph. They played twice as many passes as United, who could muster only 35% of possession, their lowest at home since records began.

This was the day that revealed, beyond any doubt, that City are the most “progressive, intelligent, incisive club in town”, said Ian Herbert in the Daily Mail. They “delivered the game’s best players” – David Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, Raheem Sterling – and its finest football. Like true champions, “they were not all sweetness and light, either”: this is a team that knows how to tackle and block. City could have used some of that grit last season, said Jamie Jackson in The Observer. After leading for the first ten matches, they gave away too many silly points and finished third. Yet this time around, Pep Guardiola’s demanding methods are getting the best out of his footballers: John Stones has “switched from unreliable to accomplished stalwart of the back line”; Sterling has already scored 13 goals. No player better embodies Guardiola’s philosophy than Silva, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. On Sunday, the Spanish midfielder may have been the “least physically imposing” player on the pitch, but he was majestic nonetheless: he directed the play with a “slow-motion grace”, as if he were two steps ahead of everyone else.

United, by contrast, were desperately short of creativity, said Rory Smith in The New York Times. Mourinho had them playing “deeper and deeper, reliant on hopeful long balls and fractured counter-attacks”. The home fans’ exasperation was palpable: “If United is to lose, this is not how the club expects to go about it.” Few United players “covered themselves in glory”, said James Ducker in The Daily Telegraph, but Romelu Lukaku had a particularly dismal game. The Belgian striker fluffed a chance to score; he was yet more of a failure at the other end, where his errors contributed to both of City’s goals. Having started the season superbly, with seven goals in his first seven games, he has scored only once in the league since then. He is prone to going missing in “high-profile matches” – and here, once again, he flopped “when it mattered most”.