At the beginning of December, Manchester City was unbeaten in the Premier League having won twelve and drawn two matches. It led Manchester United by five points and, given it had thrashed United 6-1 at Old Trafford, it seemed the season could turn into an extended victory march. Nothing, though, is ever that simple, and particularly not for City, a club whose pursuit of glory has always been undermined by an irresistible urge for the slapstick.
This is, after all, the club that was relegated in 1938 as the highest scorers in the First Division, that blew a comfortable lead in 1971-72 by signing Rodney Marsh and that was relegated in 1996 after wasting time in the mistaken belief it needed only a draw to stay up when it actually needed a win.
If it does falter, though, allowing United through to win a 20th championship, the failure wouldn’t fit into the same category. True, only four sides have ever taken such a high proportion of points available from their first 14 games (Manchester United, 12-2-0 in 1985-86; Tottenham Hotspur, 13-1-0 in 1960-61; Manchester United, 13-0-1 in 1907-08; Preston North End, 12-2-0 in 1888-89), and three of those four went on to win the title.
But really, taking a historical perspective, City hasn’t done a lot wrong. It has only lost four times this season and drawn three: 66 points from 28 games leaves them on target to reach 90 points, a total exceeded only three times since the top division reverted to a 20-team structure in 1995. True, 11 of the 18 points City has dropped have come in the 11 games since Christmas, a wobble that suggests City may end up with fewer than 90 points, but it still feels strange to be talking of crisis or a loss of form at a club that has won seven of its last nine games. This, rather, is a slight stutter that has allowed United in, but only because United, almost unnoticed, has put together a run of 22 points from their last eight games.
Still, slight as it has been, there has been a downturn. Part of the issue is Edin Dzeko. At the beginning of the season he hit a run of purple form that brought 10 Premier League goals in seven starts (although he did play 70 minutes as a substitute against United). His last eight starts have yielded just three.
He is a mystifying player. At times, he can look unstoppable, a powerful, hard-working and direct forward in the mold of, say, Christian Vieri. At others, he bumbles about, the awkwardness of his gait making clear why at Zeljeznicar, his first club, he was nicknamed “Kloc” – a slang term for a lamppost or the pole used to hold up street-signs. Watching him against Tottenham in City’s 5-1 win at the start of the season, it seemed inconceivable that Zeljeznicar’s directors would celebrate with champagne when they sold him to the Czech side Teplice for 25,000 Euros; his more recent form makes you wonder if Sir Alex Ferguson was right to reject him as too slow. He’s not slow, per se, but on a bad day it does seem to take him an awful long time to transmit messages from his brain to his feet. That issue, perhaps, can be solved by the return of Carlos Tevez after his long exile.
But there are other concerns. Should a squad that has been bought at such expense really be so reliant on Vincent Kompany and Yaya Toure? When either is missing, City appears a diminished force.
And then there are the questions about Roberto Mancini. His capacity to fall out with players is well-established – it’s often forgotten that the dispute with Tevez in Munich followed the angry reaction of the usually placid Dzeko to being substituted. To an extent, that is an issue of style rather than anything more substantial: Plenty of great managers have existed in a state of near-permanent conflict with their stars. The worry here is that a squad such as City’s, the size and quality of which means top-class players are constantly struggling for game time, is prone to cliques and rebellion, something Mancini’s attritional approach may exacerbate.
More serious, though, are the concerns about Mancini’s tactical nous. There have been undoubted triumphs - killing the league match at Arsenal last season, for instance, when City somehow came unscathed through a barrage in the opening minutes, shut up the midfield and in the end walked away with a relatively comfortable 0-0 draw. But, as Miguel Delaney points out, only once this season has Mancini affected a game-changing substitution, when he brought on Mario Balotelli at Everton.
The sample size is small but match-management may be relevant as a microcosm of the title race. Only once this season have City won a game with a goal after the 80th minute; three times they’ve conceded key goals after that time. United, by contrast, the long-acknowledged masters of the late goal, have scored six and conceded none in the final 10 minutes (plus injury-time) of games. United has a toughness, a streetwiseness, that allows it to keep battling, to turn games almost by force of will. City, as yet, seems not to, and that makes you wonder how they will cope in the final weeks of the season.
There’s a lot of nonsense been talked about Ferguson’s aptitude for “mind-games”, almost as though his every utterance is pre-planned as part of a greater game of influence and suggestion. In this case, though, the term seems justified. When United trailed City by seven points, he spoke of the anxiety of the run-in and City’s lack of experience in such situations. It may be nonsense, but he sowed the seed; Ashley Young, presumably acting under orders, watered them on Sunday, insisting that “the pressure’s on City”. Whether City’s players felt pressure before or not, it’s become an issue.
Mancini’s key task is to quell those doubts, to make his players believe that their form is actually good – as it is. Maintain form, and the title will effectively be decided when City meet United at the Etihad on April 30. The danger for City is the wobble becomes a collapse and that game becomes an irrelevance.
