Sterling quick off the mark as City stroll it
No doubt you can guess what happened from the scoreline. So here’s an old Ronnie Corbett joke.
A bloke goes to his local golf club to find a stranger looking for a game. The two men agree to play and, on the first tee, the stranger takes out a hockey stick. He addresses the ball and hits it 250 yards down the middle. From there, he removes a short length of lead piping, and chips on. He putts out with a snooker cue, for birdie.
This continues all the way round. Pieces of drainpipe, scrap wood, odd bits of metal. At the turn, he’s three under par. Finally, the club member can stand no more. ‘I can’t help noticing,’ he says. ‘The unusual set of clubs you’ve got there. What’s that about?”
‘It’s my curse, you see,’ the stranger says. ‘I’m so naturally gifted at everything that I have to make it more challenging or I get bored. If I play tennis, I use a cricket bat. If I play cricket, I use a wooden spoon.’
The member thinks about this for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he says.
‘Yes, everyone does,’ the stranger replies. ‘And the answer is standing up in a hammock.’
And that’s what City are making the league look like this season. Pretty soon, they’ll have to do it standing up in a hammock just to stay focused.
A goal up in 38 seconds, three clear soon after the hour, they brushed Watford aside with an ease that made a mockery of this talk of blips after two dropped points at Crystal Palace.
Sergio Aguero alone could have had a hat-trick in less than 20 minutes, but had to settle instead for just one, City’s third — the goal that confirmed there would be no Watford revival that affected the outcome.
Andre Gray pulled one back from a cross by Andre Carillo on 82 minutes but by then it was too late. City had been in control from the first attack, easing back to a 15-point lead at the top, taking their tally of goals scored against Watford in the league this season to nine.
Sloppy defending, including an own goal, helped — and Heurelho Gomes finally cracked under the pressure of City’s relentless attacks. He tamely pushed out a cross from Kevin De Bruyne in the 63rd minute, to allow Aguero the simplest tap-in, having missed two equally straightforward chances earlier. He should have scored with a close-range shot before half-time, then missed a free header from the first attack of the second half. He hit the bar in the 73rd minute, too. Not that it mattered. City will have to raise their game when they next play in the league, against Liverpool at Anfield, but they always had too much for Watford here.
Thirty eight seconds. That was the time elapsed when Manchester City shook off any remaining negativity from the dropped points at Crystal Palace and got back to business as usual.
Pep Guardiola said the festive period was disastrous for players and, irrefutably, it is. Going 2-0 up so early, however, was as near to a tonic as it gets.
The City boss said: ‘We played really well. After dropping two points, we spoke about our reaction because big teams drop points but not too much. We made five changes from the last game but it’s not our fault. I know here in England the show must go on, but that’s not normal guys. The big bosses should reflect that.
‘We’re going to kill the players. The federations don’t think about the players but they have to. They play 11 months in a row. They have to protect them and play with quality and not quantity. We have to think about the artists. But I know it won’t happen.’
Guardiola was boosted by having De Bruyne available when he could easily have been kicked out of a month or more by Crystal Palace’s Jason Puncheon on New Year’s Eve. Having disappeared on a stretcher then, he made a surprising recovery to start.
‘Kevin has an inflammation and we said maybe you stay back and don’t play, but he said he wanted to play,’ explained Guardiola.
‘He had a bit of pain but he wanted to play. It showed me a lot. He wants to win the Premier League. We want to follow him in this behaviour.’
It took Watford a good 20 minutes to gain composure against City’s forwards and by then the game was as good as won.
The opener, from the first attack, was effortless — David Silva playing a delightful ball inside the full back, a neat cross from Leroy Sane on the left, Sterling left alone at the far post to convert into an unguarded net.
By the time City went two up, they could have led by four. Sane versus Daryl Janmaat was shaping up as one of the mismatches of the season, every involvement a goalscoring opportunity.
After five minutes, he cut one back to John Stones who, despite his status as a defender first, should have scored instead of sending his close-range shot high into the night sky.
Finally, Watford caved. Silva was again the architect, slipping the ball in to De Bruyne on the right, the Belgian sending a dangerous pass into the six-yard box, trapping Christian Kabasele into a panicked attempted clearance, who diverted it past Gomes.
It went down as De Bruyne’s assist, his tenth of the season, the first to reach that number in Europe’s top five leagues.
on it continued. De Bruyne hit the bar with a free-kick after 18 minutes, while a Sterling cross found Aguero just before half-time — his shot weak and saved by Gomes. MANCHESTER CITY (4-1-4-1): Ederson; Walker, Stones (Danilo 67), Otamendi, Delph; Fernandinho; Sterling, D Silva, De Bruyne, Sane; Aguero. Subs not used: Bravo, Gundogan, Mangala, B Silva, Zinchenko. Booked: D Silva. WATFORD (4-2-3-1): Gomes; Janmaat, Wague, Kabasele, Zeegelaar; Doucoure, Watson (Pereyra 61); Carrillo, Capoue (Cleverley 61), Richarlison; Gray. Subs not used: Karnezis, Prodl, Mariappa, Sinclair, Holebas. Booked: Pereyra. Man of the match: Kevin De Bruyne. Referee: Lee Mason. Attendance: 53,556.