Huddersfield provide spirited test but Manchester City display strength of character, exemplified by Raheem Sterling’s relentless running, to win 2-1After Manchester City won 3-2 at West Bromwich Albion four weeks ago, the home team’s then-manager, Tony Pulis, was asked whether he thought Pep Guardiola’s fearsome side could go through the whole season unbeaten. “They’ve got to be fortunate with injuries and the bounce of the ball,” Pulis replied before adding that it would be interesting to see how City’s away form holds up as winter rolls in. “You saw what happened to Manchester United when they went to Huddersfield and it was wet and windy,” he warned. Related: Pep Guardiola says it’s important for Manchester City to suffer … and...
The sense of purpose at the club goes well beyond Pep Guardiola’s squad, with youth sides and the women’s team showing the scale of the ownership’s plans“It’s Mars Next Stop,” was the back-page headline in the Daily Express on 13 May 1968. Manchester City had won the championship and, though it was another 40 years or so before the term “noisy neighbours” was applied (copyright: Sir Alex Ferguson), it is fair to say they had no intentions of going about it quietly.Their manager, Joe Mercer, set the tone in the week building up to the game at Newcastle in which they clinched the title, announcing to the newspapermen that he had already been practising the walk to Stretford to collect...
The midfielder’s route to the top with Huddersfield, via Manchester City’s burgeoning global empire, illustrates not just the Australian’s talent but the new nature of player recruitmentWhen Huddersfield paid a club record £8m to sign Aaron Mooy from Manchester City last summer, Town’s chairman, Dean Hoyle, hailed the deal as a “no-brainer” while acknowledging that City had been canny to sign the player a year earlier even though the Australian had never got anywhere near Pep Guardiola’s squad.Mooy’s story showcases not only his own qualities but also how recruitment is changing in English football, with City among the clubs assembling huge portfolios of players in much the same way as speculators build property empires. Related: David Wagner orchestrating a powerful...
Pep Guardiola’s free-flowing team are starting to run away with the Premier League and are doing it in a way that cannot help but soak up new admirersThe devil always gets the best tunes. Watching Paris Saint-Germain overwhelm Celtic in the Champions League on Wednesday the most striking thing about PSG was not the sense of powerful gears still in reserve, or even the basic beauty of their attacking play, the way the ball skittered about between Neymar and promising loanee-trialist Kylian Mbappé like a bead of water in a pan of hot fat. The most remarkable thing was how difficult it was, suddenly, to properly dislike them.Difficult but not impossible. It is important to emphasise this. PSG’s on-field brilliance...
English clubs in the Champions League are benefiting from the change in the calendar of the women’s game with two of two their number in the quarter-finalsLast week Manchester City and Chelsea secured their places in the Champions League quarter-finals. Both sides won in style over the two legs, Chelsea beating Rosengard 4-0 overall and City gaining their last-eight place with a 7-1 aggregate score against LSK Kvinner.These were no mean feats. Rosengard are Champions League quarter-final stalwarts, having made the last eight seven seasons running. The Swedish side were runners-up in the 2017 Damallsvenskan (Swedish league) to the quarter-finalists Linkopings for the second year in a row. Related: Vivianne Miedema: ‘We put the same effort in – we deserve...