Manchester City are killing football. It is a delicate dismemberment, a beautiful butchery, but they are so good, so brilliant, so crammed with genius and artistry, that the game sinks to its knees and accepts its own death. If the essence of a match is a contest in which people or teams compete against each other in a sporting context, then City are doing something else, playing something else. There is no match.
After their defeat by Liverpool, City were murderous. They had 81 per cent of possession against Newcastle United, a figure that, at one stage in the second half, had crept up by another three points. By the end of it all, Rafa Benítez’s team had strung together 191 passes, which if you include added time, works out at about two per minute. How can it be football if the ball does not touch the other side’s feet?
Jürgen Klopp did not provide football with an answer six days earlier; not for the mortals, anyway. “Every team has their own players,” Benítez said. “It’s not like Liverpool, who had five players who could make their difference on their own. We don’t have these kind of players.” Newcastle have no game-changer. Jonjo Shelvey, their most creative outlet, has no goals and no assists in the Premier League this season.
So, just as they did at St James’ Park in December, Newcastle sat back, took their punishment, pierced by 1,000 thrusts, and waited; for City to tire, grow bored, lose cohesion. At 2-0 down, Jacob Murphy scored a fine goal, but Benítez had one eye on Sergio Agüero, Leroy Sané, Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling and another on the table and the column marked “goal difference”. This was Newcastle’s triumph.
No wonder Pep Guardiola appears so sanguine about Alexis Sánchez, a long-term target, joining Manchester United. If that represents a festering disappointment, the City manager smothered it by mentioning the prospect of setting a new record for points. Theirs is a strange existence where Sánchez is a player they can either have or not have and still happily go about bludgeoning their opponents.
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Sané was excellent, Agüero brutal against a team he loves to disjoint. The Argentinian has plundered 14 goals against Newcastle in 12 games and the latest adornments were a faint header, a soft penalty and a sound finish after Sané’s searing run. “Who has the record for scoring the most goals in the Champions League? Me. With Liverpool and with Real Madrid,” Benítez said. The sadness is that Mike Ashley’s Newcastle diminishes him.
In Spain, Benítez faced the great Barcelona sides when in charge of newly promoted Extremadura. “My first time with Extremadura we lost 1-0, but we were 4-4-2 and organised and pressing high,” he said. “Yes, the difference between us was massive, but now you can see against these teams that even if you play a good game, you can concede four goals and lose. There is a massive difference between the top six and the rest, so big that in the last ten minutes you can concede two or three goals.
“You have to find the right balance to create something, but not be embarrassed because you concede too many. It’s quite difficult. It’s bigger than when I was playing Barcelona. The teams at the top are spending more money.” He surveyed the result. “I was expecting something like that.”
“The dream is to do that and create more chances,” Guardiola said when asked about all that time on the ball. He doesn’t want the other team to touch it at all. Terry Venables once said of the old, long-ball Wimbledon that they “are killing the dreams that made football the world’s greatest game”, but City are different. Guardiola will be not satisfied until his players are pirouetting and prancing on the battlefield, forging art amongst corpses.