http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/footba ... ecial.html
Manchester City offer a hint of future perfect as the Premier League prepares to witness something very special
City are a team taking flight and February could confirm the real potential of Manuel Pellegrini's hugely talented squad.
By Paul Hayward, Chief Sports Writer
While West Ham were supposedly dragging football back to the 19th Century this week, Manchester City staked a claim on the next few decades. This looks like one of those moments in the evolution of English football when everyone stops what they are doing to observe something special.
No European city can match the clash of empires now shaking the walls of Manchester. The dominant legacy of Sir Matt Busby and Sir Alex Ferguson urgently seeks a new form under David Moyes, while City show that the quickest path to hearts and minds is through entertainment. The impetus is unquestionably with City, which is not a sentence you would have typed in what we might call the Garry Cook years.
Roberto Mancini’s hectoring and aloof approach produced the breakthrough, but the film has moved on without him, to what we saw at Spurs on Wednesday night: a 5-1 win that followed a 6-0 victory in Manchester, as well as thumping wins over Arsenal (6-3), West Ham (9-0 on aggregate in the Capital One Cup) Norwich (7-0) and Manchester United (4-1).
Here is a team taking flight, with nothing to show for it yet, but a quadruple of targets. The tightness and drama of this Premier League title race has denied City their full quota of praise and attention, as has Manuel Pellegrini’s phobia for emotive language.
But the rewards could hardly be more glittering as Chelsea gather themselves for the trip to Manchester on Monday night. February brings an opportunity to sweep Barcelona out of the Champions League and take their place as the most stylish team this side of Munich. Beyond this season’s challenges, City must see that the strength of their squad and the generosity of their benefactor serves up a chance to supplant United as the city’s biggest power.
This would have seemed unthinkable in the old Maine Road days of gallows humour, annual managerial sackings, journeyman players and terrible kits.
The United-City rivalry now pits American speculators against Middle Eastern spenders whose investments in Melbourne Heart and a new MLS franchise in New York demonstrate a wider policy of exploiting the football obsession on three continents. All this from an absentee owner – Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan – who watches the Etihad light show on a giant screen somewhere in Abu Dhabi.
The two Manchester clubs are now in an arms race, with the Glazers needing to service debt and protect United’s status as England’s No 1, and Sheikh Mansour encouraged by his success so far to believe that this money war is winnable, whatever local history and tradition says.
City’s style of play is certainly out in front. These are the moments that raise football above money, quenelles, commercial obsessions, vile crowd behaviour and diving. A new glow is created and everyone who loves the game for its own sake – as a place where creativity and excitement can thrive – is drawn to watch a particular team, who themselves begin to see how good they are and ride the opportunity. Am I putting enough pressure on?
One Tottenham fan who has been attending games at White Hart Lane for 40 years said City’s display in the first half-hour on Wednesday night was the best he had seen from a visiting club.
We have seen this level of entertainment before, of course. The United side of Mark Hughes, Eric Cantona and Andrei Kanchelskis was Ferguson’s first great attacking team, and others followed with Ryan Giggs, David Beckham and Paul Scholes, not to mention the 2008 Champions League winning side that was built around Cristiano Ronaldo.
Arsenal’s Invincibles induced the same awe as this City team. Highbury glowed with the majesty of Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Robert Pires. In schools and offices, on trains and buses, then, neutrals would swap impressions of Arsenal’s scintillating play.
Never, though, has such an exuberant team found itself in the hands of such a lugubrious manager. In public Pellegrini is the man who will not be drawn: on injuries, on transfers, on trophy targets. In their most successful phases, Ferguson and Arsène Wenger radiated pride in what they had built. Both are essentially romantic. But Pellegrini is not the constructor of City’s squad. If he is giddy about Silva’s trickery and Sergio Agüero’s finishing then he hides it well.
There are imperfections. Martín Demichelis appears at times like one of those classy old pros whose legs have slowed and who ought to be at a mid-table club. There are days when Edin Dzeko still swipes and thrashes at chances. But a front two of Agüero and Álvaro Negredo is pretty much unimprovable. A shortage of defensive midfielders is another fault-line. If you score two, however, they make sure they score five.
Last season they were undone by post-victory complacency, internal rancour and the amount of time Ferguson spent in the video analysis room plotting his revenge against Mancini’s team. At that point there was no winning tradition at City, just a one-off triumph that could not be sustained in the face of Robin van Persie’s move to United.
Now, every one of these players can see the opportunity to turn the lights out on United and reduce Jose Mourinho to the role he played at Real Madrid in relation to Barcelona: the schemer and mathematician, defeated by creativity.
The trick City are pulling off is to make their lavish spending appear as a gift to the game rather than an outlet for sovereign wealth and an exercise in future-proofing. The club’s Spanish controllers understand that the best way to earn praise is by facilitating excitement, which is why Pellegrini was hired.
When United unveiled Juan Mata, thus connecting themselves at last to Spain’s golden age, City unleashed Silva at White Hart Lane the next night to inflict his subtle punishments on Spurs. Even here we see a direct confrontation between City and United. Observe the battle of the Spanish No 10s.
As they left the field at Tottenham, you could see in the faces of these City players that the world is in their hands. For a footballer there is presumably no finer feeling than to be part of such a potent blend of talents. To be able to dazzle and demoralise with the pace and geometry of their attacking play must be intoxicating.
Even Barcelona will twitch in their seats. Chelsea, too, after dropping home points against West Ham. If this is just a mid-season flourish from City then our eyes and senses are useless for spotting patterns and power shifts. For now we should trust our instincts.
