Will Arteta regret not going full Arsenal?
Perhaps in years to come those who were present at the Etihad Stadium for this extended headlock, football reimagined as a complex and lingering Sunday hangover, will say I was there when Manchester City failed to score in a home game for the first time in 58 matches.
What to say about a game that wasn’t really a game, a decider that decided very little, beyond keeping the Premier League title race still tantalisingly open? What happened here anyway?
The first half of this 0-0 draw was like watching someone sit a high‑level engineering exam. Intricate, unknowable things seemed to be happening. No doubt there is deep-data analysis to be made of those 45 minutes of feint and counter-feint, the ghost‑pressing of Bernardo Silva, the almost total lack of involvement of Erling Haaland, who skulked at the edges of the afternoon like a nephew forced to walk around an art gallery.
A few things did happen. Perhaps the most notable was the recurrent spectacle of Nicolas Jover, Arsenal’s set-piece coach, leaping up every time his team won or conceded a corner, striding out to replace Mikel Arteta in the managerial crow’s nest, pointing and whistling, frowning sagely as another deep delivery was punted into the arms of Stefan Ortega. This kind of makes sense, logically. But it really has to stop.
There were brief flickers of freedom. With 76 minutes gone Kevin De Bruyne went barrelling down the left wing, bouncing Thomas Partey away, trying to make football happen. His cross found Jérémy Doku, who stopped, jinked, then walloped the ball weirdly high and wide, like a man punting an empty tin can with a square‑toed boot.
In between it was novel and even quite comforting to see a football match so devoid of content. City had 75%
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