On the horizon where beauty and sadism meet, Manchester City tore Brighton to ornate, sumptuous shreds. It was luxurious, it was cruel, it was pointless and yet in a strange way seemed to mean everything. With nothing tangible to play for in the league, City simply played for the joy of playing, abetted by an opposition who were more than happy to let them do so.
Perhaps, on reflection, this is the best way of all to enjoy Pep Guardiola’s baroque creation: no fans, no background noise, no forced narratives. Just football as its own lavish end. For the muted celebrations and multiple substitutions, City’s intensity was irrepressible and irresistible. Sterling bagged a hat-trick, Jesus and Bernardo Silva added one each, but by then everyone was having far too much fun to keep counting.
Well, Brighton excepted. Probably if not quite mathematically safe, Graham Potter’s side remain a gloriously flawed machine: polished and ambitious and yet still liable to keel over at the slightest breeze. Sort the defence out and there’s a potential top-10 side in there. But it’ll need a few new personnel and perhaps even a culture shift, for right now they are the sort of team you relish playing.
For Manchester City, whose biggest battles lie in other arenas – namely, the Champions League and the Lausanne courtroom where they are due to learn their fate on Monday – this was another opportunity to groove new combinations and drill old ones.
At the back, the nascent partnership between Aymeric Laporte and the teenager Eric García is blossoming into something very special indeed. If Garcia is still occasionally vulnerable in direct duels – Aaron Connolly brushed him aside a little too easily at one point here – then he more than compensates with decision making and technical qualities that already verge on the elite.
With the quietly excellent Rodri again pulling the strings, City’s core looks well-equipped for another assault on the title next season. And ahead of them: the classic front five, who really might all have scored here. Brighton’s expansive passing game makes them probably the best team to watch in the bottom half of the league, but it also leaves them badly stretched at the back: vulnerable to a single mistake or a single neat sequence. Brighton are nowhere near good enough to avoid the former, and City easily good enough to produce the latter.
And so with the game quickly tilting in one direction, it was to the surprise of nobody that City eventually found a way through on 20 minutes. Riyad Mahrez was allowed time to clip a long raking ball to Gabriel Jesus up front, who cleverly cushioned a header into Raheem Sterling’s path. Sterling took a look, took a touch, and curled the ball low into the bottom corner. And for all the desperate lunging and chasing, at no point in this sequence of events did a Brighton player get even remotely close to making a challenge: a perfect socially distanced goal that said as much about Brighton’s docility as City’s ability to elude them.
Still, the bombs kept raining in. Jesus clattered the bar. Mahrez curled just wide after another lightning break. On the sideline, Guardiola tore strips off his scalp as Benjamin Mendy smashed a shot wide instead of crossing. Two minutes before half-time, the towering Rodri got ahead of Adam Webster to flick on Kevin De Bruyne’s corner, giving Jesus the easiest of tap-ins at the far post. And when Sterling grabbed his second goal, a simple header from Mahrez’s unchallenged cross to cap a relentless start to the second half from City, even the cardboard cutouts at the Amex Stadium could have been forgiven for leaving early to beat the traffic.
By this point the wheels really were beginning to come off. Silva burgled a fourth after Mat Ryan spilled his initial shot. Guardiola and Potter made a triple substitution each, which only seemed to add to the international-friendly feel, perhaps against a small island nation with a precious vote on the Fifa executive committee. Finally, the punchline: Sterling completing his hat-trick with a header, albeit one he knew little about, the ball hitting him and trickling over the line as he crumpled to the turf in a heap. It was that sort of game for City. It’s been that sort of restart, really.