Manchester City’s title is a triumph of class and refinement on the hoof
Was it ever in doubt? Funnily enough, the answer to this question is yes. Such has been the serene, high-spec nature of Manchester City’s passage through the second half of the season it is easy to forget that the drive towards a third Premier league title in four years contained its own wrong turns, crunched gears and a sustained period of meandering in the doldrums.
Even the moment of triumph, Leicester’s victory at Old Trafford, following a careless defeat to Chelsea for a second-string City team, suggests a club easing through this series of weekly engagements with its biggest weapons safely holstered.
In reality this has been a league title characterised by refinement on the hoof – and a personal triumph for Pep Guardiola, whose success is often criticised on two fronts. Firstly, that he wins only because he has the best players.
This is both true and also pointlessly true, a paradox hard-wired into modern football, and one that will remain right up until the moment Guardiola takes a three-year sabbatical at Plymouth Argyle. The richest teams employ the most successful manager. Repeat until the coming revolution.
The second criticism of Guardiola is that he plays only one way, that he has a zealot’s attachment to a certain brittle style. And in more micro terms Guardiola has done something different this season, dialling back the more absolute elements of his ideologue’s style, allowing his team to breathe more, defend in more orthodox ways; and to find other ways of winning in this most draining, bubble-bound season.
Not that this was always evident. “We are struggling, we have to find solutions,” Guardiola mused in mid-November during one of those strangely open, unmannered press conferences where he seems, suddenly to be thinking aloud. City were 13th. Their goals total was the club’s lowest at that stage since 2006.
A lack of energy was diagnosed. There was widespread analysis of the dropping-off in City’s pressing stats, of opponents having found ways to break that grip high up the pitch. City’s