There came a point, some time between Ilkay Gündogan missing an open goal and Oleksandr Zinchenko getting himself sent off and Davinson Sánchez heading the ball against his own crossbar from point-blank range, when you realised that whatever they tried, whatever they did, Manchester City were not going to score. It happens. Some days you just catch a whiff of bad juju at breakfast, can’t shake the feeling on the bus to the stadium, miss a couple of early chances and the entire afternoon simply unravels with a strange and unstoppable momentum. Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, once wrote a book called The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance. This was the shorter and less acclaimed sequel: By Chance, the Ball Doesn’t Go In.
It’s possible, of course, to reverse-engineer these things with the benefit of hindsight. You could say City were profligate in front of goal, that Kevin De Bruyne lacked his usual precision, that Raheem Sterling looked like a man who needed a rest a month ago, that a more experienced defender than Zinchenko would have realised that the threat of a sprinting Harry Winks on the counter is really not very much of a threat at all. You could study the goals in agonising microscopic detail and draw little coloured arrows on the screen and make sombre statements like: “For me Brian, Fernandinho’s got to be quicker to close him down there, even if we have used digital technology to slow down his movement to one-12th of its usual speed.”
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