Manchester City are peaking at the right time, Brentford risk their season petering out and Spurs live in the land of uncertaintyAfter Manchester City’s 3-0 humbling of Bayern Munich, next up at the Etihad is the Premier League’s second-bottom team, Leicester. This will be the champions’ last league game before a seismic clash with Arsenal on 26 April. Pep Guardiola’s men are in ripe form just as the treble roves into sight, with next Wednesday’s return at Bayern in the Champions League coming three days before a Wembley trip to take on Sheffield United in the FA Cup semi-finals. Erling Haaland is adding assists to his goal-gluttony, Bernardo Silva’s dancing feet are back, and Rúben Dias is a colossus in...
It’s hard to fit in at first under Pep Guardiola at Manchester City but winger is now showing what he can doEven as a Birmingham City fan I could not dislike Jack Grealish when he was at Aston Villa thanks to his attacking swagger. He has taken his talent to a different level at Manchester City, but you can still see the boundless confidence that was evident from day one.It has taken time for Grealish to find his feet after his £100m move from his boyhood club in 2021. Last season, he was regularly neither in the starting lineup nor on the scoresheet, but that has changed and he will be expected to cause problems for Leicester on Saturday. It...
In a strange twist the striker has made City more defensively solid as they look capable of an unprecedented quadrupleHistory is what happens when you’re busy making plans about how to stop Erling Haaland. After nine months of fractured storylines, the European club season is finally narrowing to a point. For all the broken notes, the time-jumps, the jetlag along the way, we could now be facing an endgame of rare clarity, a moment where the entire horizon turns a shade of sky blue.Manchester City may still end up with nothing this season, no pots to wave, no bobbing podium huddles. But they are also within a sustained final push of winning it all, of taking that almost-unprecedented treble of...
Midfielder delivers a complete one- man guide to elite-level football with an imperious display against Bayern MunichJust before the hour in this match at the Etihad Stadium, Bernardo Silva took the ball on the right flank and began to drive inside, not so much sprinting as ambling urgently, like a man running a little late to deliver a lecture, scarf flapping absently over one shoulder.Casually, more just to hold on to the ball, he nutmegged Alphonso Davies. Then he did something impossible, seeming somehow to walk through Davies’s legs in pursuit of the ball, reappearing on the other side of his man via some invisible hobbit tunnel. Continue reading...
Pep Guardiola’s charisma magnet is in mesmeric form, but predictable Liverpool should not be this easy to work outIs anyone in Britain currently having more fun than Jack Grealish? Two minutes before the end of this 4-1 annihilation of Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium Grealish left the pitch to a standing ovation, met by a tender, oddly sensual full body hug from Pep Guardiola, who for a while just wouldn’t let him go, patting his buttocks, whispering in his ear, hungry for Jack love.It isn’t hard to see why Guardiola likes Grealish. He has a way of turning mavericks, flashy destroyers, skill poppets into team cogs. And Grealish does things Pep likes, holding the ball as well as anyone, providing...