Given Manchester City’s eventful history before their recent success, it would perhaps be a bit much to suggest this run of atrocious form has given their fans new experiences.
The formerly long-suffering City fans who’d travelled to Leicester even showed they hadn’t lost their capacity for gallows humour by offering up a chant of ‘City staying up’ after their opening goal.
But it’s certainly a run that has brought back some unfamiliar experiences for those old heads as well as some novelty for younger supporters.
Today, for instance, City got to experience one of the greatest feelings in football, one so often denied to the biggest and most successful clubs: completely housing a victory you absolutely do not deserve by somehow following almost 30 minutes of sustained yet unrewarded pressure on your own goal by scoring with your very first attack of the half.
Throughout City’s frankly astonishing run of dire form that now stands at two wins in 14 games, there has remained from many a kind of bland assumption that ‘Pep will sort this out’ without ever really providing any compelling idea of what that sorting out will entail. Or even what ‘this’ actually is.
It seems mainly to be based on Guardiola’s genuinely astonishing managerial CV, which is absolutely fair enough, and more tenuously on a vaguer notion that City always struggle a bit before motoring on from January. But the struggle has always previously been things like ‘a defeat to Spurs and then a frustrating draw with Crystal Palace’ surrounded by lots of other wins. Not those results surrounded by lots of other defeats and draws. It’s never been one win in 13 that needed sorting.
However welcome and vital this particular 2-0 win at Leicester may be, it was not an afternoon that smacked of ‘this’ being ‘sorted’ in any meaningful way. The exact same frailties that have been present throughout this perplexing recent collapse were in evidence again.
In the first 10 minutes of the game, Leicester got the ball three times and could have scored three goals. Twice City were spared disaster by Jamie Vardy having strayed a boot’s length offside when there was no need for him to be so precise, so vast were the acres into which he was being invited to run.
The Vardy Blindspot has long been up there with the Spurs Blindspot on the Pep Weirdness Index so there was always potential for something daft there, and had the old warhorse had one of his more clinical afternoons it’s fair to say Pep’s woes would have deepened further.
An early penalty and possible red card for Stefan Ortega were avoided by an offside boot. A horrible error from Josko Gvardiol attempting to head the ball back to his keeper went unpunished. In those early stages of the second half in which Leicester dominated play there were further missed chances, most notably a high, flying volley attempt where the situation surely called for a diving header.
That chance came just before the game-killing second goal arrived to paint a deceptive picture of a routine away win for an elite side.
The goals both contained echoes of City’s former selves. Goals born of muscle memory and defiance, the first a slick passing move ending with a Phil Foden shot that should have been turned behind for a corner but was instead diverted only to Savinho, unmarked beyond the far post with James Justin having been lured inside to pick up the run of Bernardo Silva.
The second goal was even more Old City, with New City’s James McAtee pleasingly prominent in its creation and the Goalbot 3000 finally getting back on track after some much-needed upgrades and patches following recent malfunctions.
Even after that there were more Leicester chances and while the result might feasibly provide a springboard for… something, Pep and his players will know luck was on their side and precious little beyond the result and some very occasional glimpses in the attacking patterns hinted at a line drawn in the sand or a corner turned.
Leicester, a struggling team likely heading for relegation under a new and unconvincing manager, will view this as a genuine opportunity missed. That is revealing in itself of where City are, and how hard it can be to pull out of a tailspin like this.
We’ve seen teams have a go at City before, only to concede and then wilt away knowing their chance in the game has gone. Leicester didn’t do so here, precisely because of the vulnerability we now know City will display. An aura that takes years to build can be destroyed in weeks; that is City’s life now.
Even if results do improve, it’s likely there will be more afternoons and evenings like this one, where everything must be scrapped for and earned, where teams refuse to lie down because they retain genuine belief that City can be hurt.
Perhaps more importantly, City know it too.
This was a desperately needed victory just to stem the bleeding. But it is one small and unconvincing step on what remains a long and uncertain road for the fallen champions.
