It says a lot about the way the season has gone for everyone involved that on a day when Manchester United and Tottenham embraced their utter sh*teness and threw themselves fully headlong into the relegation battle and Nottingham Forest won again to keep their title charge on track the most surprising event of the day was Manchester City racing into an unassailable lead before half-time at Ipswich.
This was really nothing more nor less than City doing what they have done to countless teams countless times over, well, a countable number of seasons but still quite a lot of seasons. Even the chief architects of such a thumping City win would have been no great shock to anyone who had slept through large chunks of 24/25, with Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden very much to the fore while Erling Haaland did not very much but score a goal.
For the first time in a long time, then, this was City truly back in their happy place.
There have been wins recently, of course, and big wins. But this was definitely the most City of them in both style and heft.
Their recent Premier League successes came nervously at Leicester and more convincingly against a broken West Ham team in the dog days of Julen Lopetegui, a manager who had not so much lost the dressing room as never managed to have it in the first place.
And then there was the late surrender of two points at Brentford.
So while things had assuredly got better than the dark days of November and December, City had never really quite looked back until now. This was the first time there had been truly no evidence of the Broken City we watched with horror and confusion and a chuckle in that historically bad run of results.
The question is really now how far it can take them. If we truly are seeing the start of another big finish to the season from City, there’s a very real chance the answer to that question still ends up being ‘second’ which would be quite dull but also far funnier than it really has any right to be.
At the very least, a thumping win for City on the same weekend as a thumping defeat for Newcastle has left them once more in the driving seat for a top-four finish.
Less of an achievement here than pretty much anywhere else, sure, but also definitely not nothing given just how bad things got for a really quite extended period of time.
The reworked Champions League format also gives them plenty of time yet to repair the errors of late 2024, with a midweek chance to not only put themselves into the play-off round but to send PSG to the very brink of their own embarrassing early exit.
As for Ipswich, the consolation really is that days like this have been relatively few and far between, and that there are still a lot of teams in this relegation scrap with them. It’s not quite free-hit shrug-of-the-shoulders territory, because this really wasn’t good enough.
Ipswich have been better than this against better teams than City have been this season, and the individual errors that pockmarked this performance shouldn’t be and won’t be ignored completely.
But really it’s better to make them now and here against City than in a game that matters against a dafter and more direct rival like Man United or Tottenham.
For Ipswich, City and pretty much everyone else, this season really has been quite a ride.
