A relentless, incomprehensible and appalling title race comes to an end.
Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column.
City!
83 seconds. You can do a lot in 83 seconds. For example, that’s just about enough time for a watching neutral to convince themselves that despite everything, despite the odds and common sense, the Premier League title race might just be Actually On.
So thank you Glenn Murray, for opening up that really quite exciting minute-and-change of mind-bending possibility. And then — 83 seconds later — no thanks whatsoever to Sergio Aguero, who barged into everybody’s flights of fancy shouting “No! Not today! Stop being silly! Put that away!”
One brings two brings three brings four, as the old English cricket saying goes. Down went Brighton. Pfft went the As It Stands table. And City became champions again.
Was this the greatest title race of all time? Was this even a title race at all? Does it depend on what we mean by “a title race”, a subject on which Tactically Naive is about to expand? To answer the last of these questions first: yes.
If by title race, we simply mean “one or more teams in with a chance of winning the title for as long as possible”, then congratulations everybody, we absolutely nailed it. Last season, City were effectively racing themselves for the last few months of the campaign, with only the 100-point marker providing any kind of impetus. Manchester United eventually finished second, some 18 points adrift. Jose Mourinho said that was one of his greatest ever achievements, and everybody laughed. But who’s laughing at Manchester United now? Oh, right. Still everybody.
Here, a brilliant City were actually behind a brilliant Liverpool for a few minutes on Sunday, and though their win was coming from the moment Aguero slapped home that equaliser, they still had to actually go and get the thing done. A 38-game season decided in the 38th game, by two teams who simple refused to even countenance the possibility of dropping points.
And yet, to admire something is not always to be thrilled by it. Perhaps it depends what kind of race you’re after. We’ve just watched a Formula 1 race in which the very fastest car has spent the last 20 or so laps holding the second fastest car at bay. It’s been tense. It’s been technically astonishing. It’s cost a couple of small fortunes.
It has not, however, despite Liverpool’s best efforts, been an episode of Wacky Races. And maybe that’s a little bit of a shame.
Such are the ludicrously high standards that Liverpool forced City to maintain down the stretch. One side kept winning, the other had to match them. There was no space for weakness, no margin for error. No time to stop and chase the pigeons. Liverpool last dropped points on March 3. City last dropped points on January 29. The former is impressive; the latter goes beyond impressive, through astonishing, and ends up somewhere between incomprehensible and appalling.
Of course, Manchester City do not exist to fall on their face for the entertainment of neutrals. Manchester City exist to win titles and to launder the reputation of their owners, and their owners are all out of reputation. Wait, no. That’s not how that joke works. Sorry.
... er, they’re pretty good at both? Yes, that’ll do.
So if your (read: our) version of the “best” title race probably has a few more oil slicks, and not quite as many points, that’s ultimately a question of taste. We can safely say that the Premier League hasn’t seen a title race this relentless or this powerful. Or, perhaps, this ominous. Two in a row hasn’t been done for a while, and City have just pulled it off with a run of fourteen straight victories. Some were thrashings; some were close. One or two were even a little nervy.
But there they are, at the end, winners again. Indeed, their ability to not to fall on their face is, along with that goal they always score, perhaps their defining attribute. Which is why it’s always so interesting when they crash out of the Champions League.
Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. No Premier League side has ever been better at not accidentally driving backwards into a lamppost. Good trick, if you can do it.
Spurs?!
There has been a lot of football this week. A lot. Remember Vincent Kompany driving the ball into the top corner of Leicester City’s net? Remember that, back when you were younger and life was sweeter and the world still seemed so full of hope? Yeah, that was a week ago.
Since when, we’ve had that Liverpool-Barcelona game, followed by that Ajax-Tottenham game, each of which aged us all a thousand years. Much will be written about these games ahead of the final, and on through the years, but it’s perhaps worth taking a moment here to reflect on just how magnificently fortunate Spurs have been this season.
Not lucky, in the pejorative, oh-you’ve-fluked-it sense. Nothing lucky about the big beautiful bones of Fernando Llorente. But fortunate, in a head-shaking, eyebrow-raising, I-can’t-believe-they’ve-gotten-away-with-it sort of a way.
After all, this was the season that the Tottenham hierarchy went all in on the stadium, choosing not to buy a single player over the summer. This wasn’t just an offence to the founding principle of the Premier League, which holds that money must be kept moving at all times. It was a risk. And sure enough, the stadium got delayed, and the squad got depleted, and then depleted further, to the point where Spurs had to start fielding pretend players. “Oliver Skipp”? A likely story.
And it showed! They were this close to crashing out of the Champions League group stage; only Internazionale’s failure to win at home saved them. And they have picked up a mere 11 points in the last three months of the league season; only Arsenal’s failure to capitalise has kept them in the top four.
Spurs are going to the Champions League final this season, and are going back to the Champions League next season. Probably, neither of those things should really have been true. They have gotten away with it.
Of course, you might say that if there are two teams that you can rely on to prove unreliable at the crucial moment, it’s Inter and Arsenal. And you’d have a point. But still, this season could so easily have been a series of limp apologies. And for a club in Spurs’ position — that overachieving manager; all those desirable players locked into that strict wage structure — a season outside the Champions League might well have been the catalyst for the collapse of the whole project.
Instead, they’re bouncing out of this season and into the next one, and they might win the Champions League. It’s a silly game.
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