Winning the Premier League is supposed to be brutal, defending the title is becoming almost impossible – and even Pep Guardiola’s 100 Club are discovering as much.
As they sauntered to last season’s crown, it felt as if Saint Pep had mastered English football, that he’d bent the ‘most competitive league in the world’ to his own will.
A century of points, 106 goals and a highlights reel that belonged in the Tate Gallery rather than on Match of the Day.
Backed by the billions in Abu Dhabi and coached by the Catalan with the planet-sized brain, City surely couldn’t fail to become the first team in a decade to win back-to-back titles.
Yet a bone-chilling midweek programme showed exactly what this league is made of.
City beaten at Newcastle, only for title rivals Liverpool to be held by Leicester. Chelsea trounced at Bournemouth. Manchester United needing an epic comeback to draw at home to Burnley and Tottenham with a similar late rally to pip Watford.
Earlier this season, it felt as though that kind of glorious chaos was a thing of the past in the English top flight.
Throughout August, September, October and November, ‘Big Six’ clubs lost just three matches against teams from outside their roped-off elite.
Yet in December and January there were NINE such shock victories.
And City have suffered three of those defeats – at home to Crystal Palace, at Leicester and now at Newcastle.
Of course, while City were nowhere near their best on Tyneside, it could still have been very different.
Kevin De Bruyne was so quick-thinking in taking a free-kick from which Sergio Aguero netted, that the goal was not only disallowed but the Belgian was booked by ref Paul Tierney – presumably for the newfound crime of showing vision and initiative.
Kyle Walker played Salomon Rondon marginally onside for Newcastle’s opener and Fernandinho was caught in two minds, tripping Sean Longstaff to concede the decisive penalty.
After defeating Liverpool to officially reboot the title race on January 3, City had scored 28 unanswered goals in all competitions.
Yet just when they were beginning to look imperious again, two momentary lapses in concentration was all it took to cost them against one of the league’s poorest relations.
Winning back-to-back titles in England does just take mental resilience, it takes remorselessness.
That ability to go on and on and on was certainly possessed by Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, skippered by Roy Keane, and by Bob Paisley’s Liverpool, captained by Graeme Souness – both of whom
managed three in a row.
Guardiola’s City are staging the most sustained attempt at a title defence by any club in the post-Ferguson era.
Yet do they possess that necessary remorselessness, now that English football is showing its strength in depth again?
Football has changed since the time of Souness or even Keane, and the nature of Premier League footballers has changed too.
The technical quality has never been higher, but the obsession, the bloody-mindedness, the will to win which verges on mania?
Where is the ability not only to be remorseless but to demand and extract remorselessness from others?
Vinny Kompany has come close but the wear and tear on his body means the Belgian – or should that be naturalised Mancunian? – is no longer first choice.
Somehow, Guardiola – fighting on four fronts, rather than Jurgen Klopp’s two – needs to engender that kind of spirit if City are to overhaul Liverpool’s five-point advantage down the straight.
While there are sure to be more shock results during the run-in as both clubs feel the strain, City will have to come close to 14 wins out of 14 to clinch this title.
Still, by Wednesday night, City could quite conceivably be top of the Premier League again.
They host an indifferent Arsenal on Sunday and have an extra fixture at flaky Everton on Wednesday, either side of Liverpool visiting an entirely unpredictable West Ham.
If Rafa Benitez could do Liverpool a favour, by leading Newcastle to victory over City, could Manuel Pellegrini – ‘This Charming Man’ to City fans – do the same for his old club on Monday?
Pellegrini’s three seasons at City brought one title, two League Cups and a Champions League semi-final.
As it stands, Guardiola, in his third season, has one title, one League Cup and is yet to make the last four in Europe.
So for all last season’s lauding of Guardiola as an all-time great, he has not yet proved himself as a better City manager than Pellegrini – at least not in black-and-white terms.
And if City fail to win this title then, despite accepted wisdom, it will confirm the fact that the Premier League is in an historically unpredictable period.
Never in the German Bundesliga or Spain’s La Liga has there been a spell of ten years in which no team has won back-to-back crowns.
In France and Italy, the all-time record stands at 11 years without a successful title defence.
In England there was a golden age of uncertainty in which no club retained the crown between Wolves in 1959 and Liverpool in 1977 – a stretch which included a spell of 11 different champions in 13 seasons.
Those days are long gone, thanks largely to Champions League cash, but things are far less likely than they seem.
And Guardiola is discovering it to his cost.
YES it was a dismal January transfer window on the whole but there could have been few better feelgood stories than Peter Crouch returning to the Premier League with Burnley at the age of 38.
Perhaps the most personally popular English player of the modern era, Crouch was the gangly, awkward kid – who claims he'd have been a virgin if he wasn’t a professional footballer.
Yet he’s ended up marrying a supermodel, becoming a famous dancer, playing at a World Cup, in a Champions League Final, winning the FA Cup and scoring one hundred Premier League goals.
And if he finds the net for the Clarets, Crouch will become only the second man in history to score for seven different Premier League clubs.
The first to achieve that feat was Craig Bellamy. And so Crouch will become the undisputed best bloke to have scored for seven different Premier League clubs…
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