Manchester City, Liverpool and Spurs provided three remarkable nights – and the Premier League climax is next upThis week, football has improvised the perfect movie script, full of fight, heart, desire, determination, tears of anguish, tears of joy, unsung heroes taking centre stage and the impossible becoming possible. This movie is a true story that ended with two English teams reaching the Champions League final, proving that maybe the Premier League is the best in the world after all.Now it goes into its final weekend with Manchester City one apparently inevitable win from the title while just behind them Liverpool, after Tuesday night’s miracle at Anfield, can make up for any domestic disappointment at the Champions League final in Madrid...
Leicester can test City but Liverpool face a challenge of their own, it’s all or nothing for Cardiff and Watford need to regroupFollowing the disappointment of their reasonably heroic Champions League defeat at Barcelona, Liverpool must rouse themselves for what could be an extremely tricky Saturday evening appointment at Newcastle in which they simply cannot afford to slip up. With only two matches of the Premier League campaign remaining, anything less than a win for Liverpool would leave the door open for Manchester City to all but wrap up the title on Monday. One suspects this is a far tougher assignment than Jürgen Klopp would like so soon after a gruelling and dispiriting game at the Camp Nou and the...
A chance for Shaqiri to shine, City may need to show their dark side and Cardiff can pile pressure on BrightonPep Guardiola is not usually short of post-match praise for his players, but he struck a different note after the Manchester derby win. “Tonight we can enjoy it, but tomorrow it’s over, so we have to be focused,” he said. “I know people are going to talk about how beautiful, how handsome we are, but now we have to go to Burnley”. Guardiola is rightly taking nothing for granted even after taking the necessary six points from Spurs and United. Burnley were one of six teams to take points off City last season and have routinely posed problems for the...
Pep Guardiolas champions showed they are human in the fraught 1-0 win over Spurs but another obstacle has been overcome with the Manchester derby up nextAt last some cracks are showing. This has been a title race characterised by the implacable excellence of one runner and the tumultuous late comebacks of the other. It has been easy to categorise Manchester City against Liverpool as control against chaos, rationality against emotion, Apollo against Dionysius. But at the Etihad on Saturday it was fraught and raw, City put under pressure by a patched-together Tottenham side but they prevailed.Two victories by a one-goal margin over Spurs in the space of four days has extended Citys run to 16 wins in 18 games (and...
Arsenal used to be in a strikingly similar position to Tottenham now but Spurs dont want to follow their rivals path since 2006the short interval since Tottenhams wild, fun, chancy away-goals victory at Manchester City in the Champions League there has been a shared urge to draw the starkest of comparisons between the two clubs: their finances, their structure, the various degrees of faux-humble Jedi-cardigan fraudulence exhibited by their managers. It is in many ways a meaningless exercise. This is a comparison of two entirely separate things, entirely separate ways of trying to reach the same point, not to mention one that is inevitably flattering to Spurs and inevitably bruising for Pep Guardiola and the football-style soft-power project operating in...