It is probably fair to say Manchester City’s in-house team made the fawning soft-focus documentary All or Nothing a year too soon. “Guys we are so close!”. That was your catchphrase. Except, they weren’t really.
City won the Premier League by a mile last year thanks to a run of sustained sublime form. But otherwise their season lost its dramatic tension on 4 April when City were eviscerated by Liverpool in the Champions League quarter-final first leg, shrinking the scope of their ambitions to that near-perfect league season. Fast forward 10 months and Sunday’s slow-burn victory in the Carabao Cup final has set up a fascinating point of contrast; one of those moments where the background noise starts to fall away and it makes sense, for the first time, to contemplate the wildly improbable.
All Or Not Quite Nothing would be a fair billing for the next three months, which are by comparison fretted with intrigue. City have a maximum of 20 matches left to play this season. In the course of which this team has a chance to add the three biggest trophies in English club football, a four-pronged feat that still looks an impossible stretch of luck, resources and the competing claims of every other club in the scrum for honours.
Most things do not happen. This one will probably not either. But then very few have ever been this close or, indeed, so close with some key factors in their favour. It was notable when Pep Guardiola was asked about the prospect of a quadruple he did not roll his eyes and say “fuck” as he did two years ago, but instead dismissed the idea in more measured terms.
Nobody manages the details like Guardiola. He knows exactly where City stand. The squad is strong. The fixtures are tough but not impossible. City have won 13 of their last 15 games. So, for now, let’s just take a moment to dream.
Straight away City have an advantage on timing. The fixtures come thick but not that fast. If they can finish off Schalke in two weeks’ time and get past Swansea in the FA Cup there is one obvious logjam to come. Between 6 April and 24 April City would play six high-pressure games in 19 days, a run that goes: FA Cup semi; Champions League quarter-final (first leg); Crystal Palace away; Champions League quarter-final (second leg); Tottenham at home; Manchester United away.
Get through another flurry around the Champions League semi-finals and the season ends in fairly orderly fashion. Brighton away is the final Premier League fixture on 12 May. The FA Cup final is on 18 May. The distant prospect of a Champions League final would round things off on the first day of June.
It is an unusually well spaced-out endgame, and a favourable turn for any club caught in the familiar English slog through the spring. By comparison Manchester United’s treble-winning season 20 years ago finished on 26 May, with United required to tie up three trophies in the final 10 days.
That United team played seven games in 26 days from the start of May. Should City get as far, they would end with four games in 28 days. Where does the advantage lie? United carried all before them in a glorious adrenal rush, with no time to look down or feel any fear. Could there be another kind of difficulty in that “cold time” between fixtures?
There are some more positive lessons to be learned along the way. United had seven different goalscorers in their last seven games, the burden shared as the line approached. And it is here that City also have deeper gears.
The only really worrying note is the injury sustained on Sunday by Fernandinho. John Stones’s return from his hamstring twang will also be vital: Vincent Kompany is a great club servant but isolated against a player like Eden Hazard he wheels around like a passenger ferry with a wonky rear thruster these days.
On the plus side Bernardo Silva is in excellent shape, all non-stop ferreting intelligence on and off the ball. Left-back has looked like a problem but Oleksandr Zinchenko was magnificent at Wembley. Sergio Agüero is in his absolute pomp right now. Raheem Sterling has five goals and four assists in 10 games, a man running hot at just the right time.
Comparisons are of course odious – and indeed meaningless given the complete re-gearing of every part of football’s surfaces from year to year. But with 20 games to win them all, the question will naturally be asked as to where such an achievement would rank.
Some will point to the thinning out at the very top, the fact fewer clubs are winning more trophies generally. But it would be incorrect to belittle this as a bought success, a triumph devalued by the extreme amounts of money involved.
For a start nobody wins anything these days without spending. That much is a given. Secondly this is above all a City team marked out by the more human elements. To miss the fact Guardiola has improved almost every one of his players, that the team has a system and a way of playing that is thrillingly well-grooved, that City have resisted the urge simply to buy ready-made world stars, is to miss the basic beauty of sport altogether.
The one area lacking is some sense of internal, organic growth. Every sporting triumph lacks a little something without an element of home-made talent. United’s treble winners had seven academy products playing regularly in the first team. The greatest British European triumph of all, Celtic in 1967, saw Jock Stein pick a team drawn entirely from the Glasgow districts. City remains a portable project, all outsourced parts, and one that has yet to spawn a regular home-grown City player since the Abu Dhabi takeover. Such is the way of modern football elsewhere too. For now Sunday’s cup final leaves this fine City team 20 games from a sporting feat that will most likely prove beyond them but which has never felt quite so close at hand.