November - Manchester is blue
As the season moves into November, and the start of the winter months, we start on a sour note with the reports that Brendan Rodgers has been earmarked by the club - for some years now - to be the successor to Pep Guardiola, should he hang up his melted badge MDCR jumper when his contract expires in the summer of 2023.
Personally, I’ve absolutely no interest in the narcissistic character merchant taking over Manchester City, especially with his rather spectacular record of consistently bottling the final couple of months of almost every single top flight season outside of Scotland that he’s managed in. Yet it appears that the club see his style of football to be somewhat of a fit for the club and, honestly, I can sort of see it. I’m tilting my head quite a lot and speaking with a high-pitched voice as I say the words sort of. It’s nowhere near the level that the club are currently operating at and, honestly, I can see the players finding the level drop quite dramatic after Pep Guardiola disappears.
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But then, the level is going to drop no matter when Pep decides he’s had enough. Such is the nature of having the absolute madman at the helm. With any luck, he’ll be sticking around for a few more years yet if his constant teasing of, “I could stay here for 10 years,” is anything to go by, so we’ll not have to worry about who’s going to take over his role just yet.
After a routine win against Club Brugge, attention turned to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United. Despite all the stick we’d given United during Ole’s time there, it was undeniable that he had somewhat of a knack of getting his woefully inferior team to turn up on the day when it came to the Manchester Derby, with his style of sitting back and relying on the pace of his players to beat our high line being annoyingly effective.
However, on this occasion it wasn’t to be the case, as Eric Bailly whacked one into his net with less than ten minutes played, pretty much setting the tone for the remainder of the game. This time, United had just been battered 5-0 by Liverpool at Old Trafford a couple of weeks beforehand and, somehow, City found a way to dominate them even more severely than Liverpool had. The gulf in quality between the two clubs has never, in my mind, been as high as it was in this derby at Old Trafford. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get near a blue shirt throughout the game, allowing City to score a ridiculous team goal after almost two minutes of uninterrupted, barely contested possession.
Elsewhere, Harry Kane opened up on the speculation surrounding his future for the first time and mad the rather bold claim that he thought he’d “coped with it well”. Harry Kane coped with the summer’s transfer saga well in the same way that the Titanic coped well with hitting an iceberg. It was an absolutely hilarious, unprofessional disaster.
The guy had to put out a full statement to confirm to fans that he was committed to the club because his team had absolutely botched the process of getting him to go on strike - to say that he’d handled it anything other than terribly is delusion.
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Still, it doesn’t matter anymore because Harry Kane is old news. After all, we’ve got Ferran…
Ah.
Well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because we can just go in for Haaland next summer, after all we’re the frontrunners to…
Oh.
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The rest of the month goes without a hitch as we defeat Everton and West Ham in the league. The Everton game brings with it Cole Palmer’s first Premier League start and, honestly, he looks like he’s part of the furniture. Doesn’t look at all out of place amongst City’s strongest XI. It’s an exciting future ahead for him and the day is topped off with James McAtee getting his first Premier League minutes as well as he comes off the bench.
This brings up an interesting clip which is found around the time of McAtee telling George Osbourne that he wants to be just like David Silva when he grows up, before George Osbourne laughs and pretends to know who David Silva is, when really all he can think about is his favourite polo player from his Eton days.
More importantly, PSG at the Etihad in order to ensure that the final game of the Champions League group stage is a dead rubber, with first place already secured. We can just rest all the big guns and keep everybody raring to go for the knockout stages. Nothing can go wrong, right?
December - Farewell to a legend
It appears that City are scrambling for a striker with the news that Ferran Torres wants to go back to Spain and they’re the favourites to sign Dusan Vlahovic - the man who is defying all xG models (for more information on this, please speak to @AndrewDettmer) but is ultimately scoring lots of goals for Fiorentina.
He’s certainly no Erling Haaland but, as we’ve already established by now, Madrid are the favourites to sign him and City don’t win bidding wars, so we need to have somebody in mind for when the inevitable rejection from the Norwegian comes.
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The month kicks off with two wins over Villa and Watford and Bernardo starts to really stake his early claim for City’s player of the season, adding to his fine form from the last month or two with some pretty ridiculous goals. The first of which comes against Aston Villa, my personal goal of the season, which you can read about here, along with my other nominees for the City Xtra awards.
He then goes on to score a goal that nobody expects him to even get near against Watford, where his trademark hard work and unbelievable technique allows him to be first to the ball and put it neatly past their keeper. The Cycling GK would never have allowed that to go in.
City then continue their fine December run by smashing Leeds 7-0 in a game which totally goes against everything we knew about Manchester City coming up against Bielsa’s Leeds from the season before. It felt like Bielsa was one of the few people who could break down what City do but, apparently, Bielsa is just a massive crouching fraud. The game leads to a very lovely celebration from Jack Grealish indeed, who has been relentlessly booed up and down the country in the months prior.
So then we come onto the game against Leipzig - that lovely Champions League dead rubber where there’s absolutely nothing at stake, no reason to get too riled up and no real consequences if we lose. One of those, “Don’t do anything stupid, just get through the 90 minutes,” kind of games.
So Kyle Walker earns himself what eventually turns out to be a three game suspension with his act of total idiocy, ruling him out of the Round of 16 entirely and, more importantly, the first leg of the Quarter Final, should we make it that far.
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Speaking of which, the draw comes around and, in true Manchester City fashion, the balls are heated so that we make sure we get one of the easiest teams left in the competition. City are initially drawn out with Villarreal, which is not the easiest team left in the competition, so UEFA order that the draw is retaken and that City are given a properly easy team. Cheers, UEFA. Always knew you were on our side.
Then we get to the FA Cup third round draw, where once again the FA are provided with a nice brown envelope filled with money and Manchester City are given an away tie to League Two Swindon Town. It just couldn’t get any better at this stage of the season. Wonderful stuff. It’s all looking great for City!
Then, a hard blow is dealt to City fans everywhere as, after weeks of rumours about his health in the aftermath of having to be substituted whilst playing for Barcelona due to chest pains, Sergio Aguero announces his retirement.
We all, as City fans, had our moment to say goodbye to Aguero, although not necessarily in person, when he left the club last summer. It was a tough moment for us all and I’m sure I’m not the only one who cried when he played his final game. We can only hope he’s going to get some kind of testimonial from the club, which both he and David Silva have been denied due to covid. Although some would look at the defending from Everton for his final day hat-trick and say he already played in a testimonial of some sort.
Ferran Torres turns his back on the opportunity to become Manchester City’s all-time record goalscorer by joining Barcelona. He leaves the club for £44 million with clauses taking it up to £55 million - a sum of money which frankly nobody is able to understand how Barcelona have even been able to get a hold of, but we don’t care because Barcelona piling themselves further and further into debt in order to try and be good again is funny.
The move annoys a lot of City fans, who think that letting an attacker go when our squad is already suffering from the lack of a genuine number 9 is a bit of a problem, plus there’s always an element of over-scrutinising a transfer when it comes to City selling a player to Barcelona because, due to the sporting structure we have in place and where those people have come from, it can sometimes feel like we’ve not put up the most resistance.
These are two points I can fully understand, however the guy hadn’t kicked a ball for us since October and was still injured when the transfer went through. We’d signed him in the summer of 2020 for around £20 million and were selling him on after what can, at best, be described as a middling first season and a mildly promising start to the second for what will eventually be nearly triple that. I had no issues with it then and, looking at the Barcelona fans and their feelings on the signing now, I have even fewer with it today.
A nice little piece of news that is guaranteed to trigger absolutely everybody who thinks that Txiki Begiristain is some kind of idiot who doesn’t know what’s good for the club, he wins the 'Best Sporting Director of the Year' award. Fully deserved. Top bloke.
Manchester City win every league game for the rest of the month and break multiple records in the process.
In the December edition of Erling Haaland-watch, Pep Guardiola is asked about the Norwegian man and refuses to comment on any kind of question about him.
It should have become clear that something was a bit different with this reaction, as we can see from when he was asked about Dani Olmo prior to the Leipzig game and outright rejected the notion of signing him, having no troubles flatly dismissing the rumours.
Maybe there is something in this idea that we might sign Haaland after all…
January - Finally, a striker!
2022 kicks off in the most hilarious fashion as Arsenal Fan TV, and for some reason quite a lot of mainstream media pundits, are left to question the merits of whether celebrating last minute winners really is a good thing after all, as Rodri dares to take his shirt off in front of some Arsenal fans as City score a last minute winner at the Emirates.
Simon Jordan, ever the reasonable, tiny-eyed thesaurus, dares to tarnish what is usually a bastion of reasoned debate and rational discussion at talkSPORT towers by claiming that Rodri’s celebration was “stupid” and calls for Rodri to “use some common sense and dial it back”, while Jim White begs the question, “Is there a fine line with players in terms of inciting a crowd?!”
We all know that Arsenal fans are not averse to a bit of crowd violence. You only need to remember Emmanuel Adebayor’s celebration and the number of chairs and objects he had thrown at him for an example of that. They’re a fanbase which can foam at the mouth if you give them half a chance - just take a look at DT.
If Rodri is at fault for the actions of what is effectively a mob of football fans then we need to just pack it in now and make celebrating goals a red card offence. Arsenal fans need to get a grip if they think there’s anything wrong with celebrating a last minute winner and any pundit who even questioned it was clearly playing up to the crowd for nothing more than the sake of sparking a faux-outraged debate, which is very much not like talkSPORT at all.
If the controversy surrounding Rodri and his choice to celebrate isn’t enough for City fans to get a hold of, Ferran Torres makes it very clear, during one of his first interviews in Spain, to tell everybody just how much he loved Manchester City all along.
For a full article about my reaction to this, you can click here. Needless to say, I don’t really care much for Torres anymore. He’s made it onto my list of enemies.
The biggest news of the month comes in the form of Julian Alvarez, a man who, when I searched for his name in Twitter while preparing for this article, had zero links with Manchester City in the month of January prior to ten days before he signed for the club. We’d heard his name vaguely mentioned in previous months but only in the sort of general articles that link him to half the top teams in Europe and don’t really prove anything in the way of genuine interest in a player.
The move seems to happen very quickly, with City appearing to have virtually agreed terms with the player and River Plate by the time the media have even got a sniff that the deal is happening at all. Is this the man City have identified to sort out their striker woes?
Jackpot. City are still in the market for a big name striker in the summer no matter what, but with the number of games that City play (combined with the fact that Alvarez is adept at playing across the front three), there’ll still be plenty of game time for the Argentine, whether it’s in the 9 or alongside another striker.
By the end of the month, the deal is officially announced. He’s cheap, with reports saying he’ll cost City only £20 million (though it’s later revealed that City pay an extra £1.5 million to get him in over the summer, rather than loaning him back to River until the end of 2022). I don’t care what anybody says, it doesn’t get much more exciting than a South American wonderkid. Just ask anybody who plays Football Manager.
January is relatively quiet on the football front with only four games played, including the Arsenal match. Manchester City easily brush Swindon aside as Cole Palmer puts on a showing which makes a lot of the footballing world stand up and take notice as a brilliant bit of skill to put the ball on a plate for Bernardo Silva’s opener is matched only by the absolutely filthy finish which he produces to round out the score for 4-1.
The Palmer content doesn’t end there, however, as in his post-match interview he is asked about the fact he’s scored goals now in the Carabao Cup, Champions League and FA Cup - leading him to mutter the immortal words:
With the rise of Foden and now Palmer, it’s great to see that City are producing genuine Manchester (well, Greater Manchester) born talents that are making their way into the first team. It’s the one thing this Sheikh Mansour era has been missing and to see the many promises made by the construction of the CFA finally come to fruition is brilliant.
Cole Palmer doesn’t really feature much for the rest of the season from this point on due to injury but I think it’s fair to say he has a bright future ahead of him, with more game time promised for next season.
Another game against Chelsea brings another 1-0 victory, with similar dominance to the last game against Tuchel’s lot. Although this time, we do allow them one solitary shot on target. The standards at this club are really slipping if we’re allowing Chelsea to have a shot on target, my word.
Kevin De Bruyne continues his campaign of hatred against his old club by scoring against them for what feels like the 86th time to secure another three points against a Chelsea team which is slowly sliding away from the title race. The goal to do it is absolutely ridiculous, as he's knocked off balance and then, with the ball caught beneath his feet, hits the ball with the power and accuracy required to put it almost perfectly in the bottom corner beyond Edouard Mendy.
Another Southampton game brings with it another draw against Ralph Hasenhuttl’s men, who aren’t having a brilliant Premier League campaign by this stage of the season but nonetheless seem to have the method of making Manchester City drop points locked down.
Still, as January draws to a close, it’s fair to say City are walking away with the league. The title race is over, boys. Wrap it up. It looks like it's set to be a boring end to the season, Liverpool aren’t coming back from here.
Topics: Manchester City, Premier League, Football
