A FRAGRANT ANARCHY

Contrary to immediate reaction, City’s match at Leeds was a more than pleasant spectacle with an ebb and flow, once Leeds had matched City’s early surge, that threatened to go on as long as the West Yorkshire downpour had. After a weekend that saw United and Liverpool, the nation’s darlings, squabbling over who could be the biggest embarrassment, a damp slide around at Elland Road suddenly looked quite fresh and acceptable. Except of course, by what these days pass as "normal standards" at the Etihad, it wasn’t.

For Bielsa, squatting over his imaginery bucket (which had been removed to catch the rain falling off the roof of the Leeds Kop), and Guardiola, striding through the morass on the touchline, time was needed to digest all they had witnessed. Both sides sped the ball on its way with a staggering blur of passes. It felt like a runaway train, making up its own route. Certainly the later stages did not seem to bear a coach’s hallmark that was even vaguely recognizable. Gustave Klimt maybe, or Raymond Queneau in tandem with a riotously inebriated Lord Byron.

It seemed the two coaches wished to join us all in watching the spectacle rather than orchestrating it as had been arranged. The whole thing had taken on a life of its own, galloping from one end to the other and back again like a bolting horse that has heard gunshots outside the stable doors.

It was difficult to say whether these was the grand chess patterns we had been waiting for the old master and his protege to come up with or whether the whole thing was some kind of semi-heated anarchy, coming gently to the boil.

City’s start had been pulverising and, until Sterling slammed a clever opener, relentless. The game flowed incessantly in the direction of the fluffy chinned Illan Meslier in the Leeds goal. De Bruyne slapped a post. Then as the half hour mark loomed, they seemed to pack up shop and sit on their hands.

One goal leads, these days, are not what they used to be. One goal Leeds are not recommended either.

The home side took the cue and, once Bielsa had pummelled them at half time with some subtle hints on upper level geometry and the Argentinian approach to the laws of gravity, they took the initiative too. 

The game swung on Ederson’s floppy attempt at a punch, but Leeds were coming hard towards an equaliser by then in any case.

For City, everything was different from how things had started. We had seen Benjamin Mendy cavorting forward with something approaching his old acceleration and control, but now he looked like the pantomime dromedary of recent months, as he failed to notice, failed to track and failed to engage his brain. Raheem Sterling had flashed through to score with the control and alacrity of a hired assassin, but now he ran through to kill the game and instead trundled the ball straight into the keeper’s hands whilst pondering long and hard what colour curtains to hoist in the snooker room back home.

“Winners have a good perfume,” Guardiola offered enigmatically at the end, not realising that just a day later both United and Liverpool would stink the pan out properly themselves. Here the smell was of wet grass, honest sweat and the sweet musk of a thousand and one little passes. If we were to complain, it could not have been about the spectacle we had watched, although the avalanche of goals that had been hoped for instead came at Old Trafford and then Villa Park instead. There could be no complaints about that either.

A funny old season is threatening to go in a completely new direction. Nobody seems to know how to defend anymore except those studious fellows at Arsenal. Everton and Villa are top and the amount of goals flying in is in direct proportion to the number of supporters kept out. Any weirder and we’ll all be sitting on upturned buckets talking inaudible Spanish. 🎲