If Manchester City’s attack resembles an inevitable tide, constantly pouring forward with super-powered panache and confidence, before each time producing the same outcome over the course of 90 minutes, Manchester United’s attack should probably go down as more of a leaky tap Louis Van Gaal has left on by mistake.
There’s the odd drip, but you imagine eventually someone will just turn it off altogether without even thinking too much about it, like Newcastle did on Saturday.
After three rounds of Premier League games, Chelsea and Arsenal’s attacks have been middling, United and Liverpool’s have been dim, and City’s has been the defining difference between itself and the rest, making everyone else’s efforts look shoddy by comparison. It’s come up with eight goals in three games so far, five of them away from home against decent teams, three of them at home to Chelsea, formerly the best defensive team in the division.
That there, my friends, represents reasonably outstanding early-season attacking – particularly as Chelsea’s defence only had the “formerly” bit attached to its “best” descriptor after City was finished with it a couple of weeks ago.
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Reverse back to that Chelsea game for a sense of perspective. John Terry, the best centre back in the league last season, didn’t know where to look, even before his awkward half-time substitution. The previously all-powerful captain was callously left for dead by Sergio Aguero on three occasions and has, since then, still to be fully revived. Alongside him on the bench for the second half, his manager Jose Mourinho felt it necessary to resort to self-parody, calling the 3-0 defeat a “fake result.” And the cause of the rupture? City’s comprehensive, dominant, destructive attacking play. I’m telling you, it’s a big deal.
More than the tangible marks on the scoreboard, what’s ultimately been most impressive so far about this attacking is the almost perpetual sense that it’s about to produce a goal. The feel of it. The possibility of it looming over everything else – like housework. This team hasn’t just tallied up goals with efficient or spectacular finishing – although that, obviously, has been a part of the deal. t’s also completely baffled the opponents it’s rolled over so far, spinning out five or six runners from midfield or full back at the same time, launching moves from different angles and finishing them from different places and with different personnel.
This team buzzes when it comes forward and the source of that buzz becomes obvious when you look at its individual components. Every week, Manuel Pellegrini is dropping down a single teamsheet containing Aguero, Raheem Sterling, David Silva, Yaya Toure and Jesus Navas, plus Aleksandar Kolarov, a de facto attacker whether he’s called a left back or not. As an offensive force, David Moyes perhaps aside, you can’t go that far wrong with players this good.
I mean, what would you do? Maybe play Aguero in midfield? Drop Sterling and Silva back to full back as an ode to Brendan Rodgers? At the very least it’s hard to come up with a combination that would absolutely, thoroughly, definitely nullify the lot of them. They’ve just got a vibe.
From the opposite perspective, there also aren’t many obvious shortcuts to stopping a selection like that as an opponent. Each of them, with the notable exception of “No Goals Navas,” can finish as and when required, so they can’t be stopped just by cutting off the supply to the single goalscorer. Then, as a group, there’s a neat variation in abilities – the crossers, the quick ones, the through-ball threaders, the chargers, the tricky dribblers and the invisible off-the-ball runners – so it’s not a case of simply finding a defensive rhythm either. They’re not going to let you “get used” to anything they’re doing.
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For everyone else, if what we’ve been shown so far is anything more than a three-game demonstration of collective excellence, City’s attack could well be the new Chelsea’s defence: the high Premier League watermark you have to get past if you want to win. Maybe even more ominous than that, though, is that where Chelsea’s defence is perhaps getting weaker, City’s attack is absolutely getting stronger.
Firstly, last season’s problem of relying too heavily and revolving too steadily around Toure has been seen off – Toure seems to have recovered the form to justify the reliance at the same time as Silva has imposed himself through the middle better than ever before, now for three games in a row. Secondly, after the signing of Sterling, Pellegrini is carrying attackers as good as Wilfred Bony and Samir Nasri around on his bench, and is still about to replace Navas on the right with Kevin De Bruyne for what I will just describe as “a lot of money.” A shoring-up process has gone on. An imposing setup has been arrived at for the start of the new season. And no-one else has looked especially ready for it.
City’s rivals are now left with some early questions: How do you stop that perpetual sense that City’s always about to score? Or, alternatively, how do you reproduce it yourself? So far we have two clues: signing Pedro from Barcelona is a good start. Insisting that Wayne Rooney alone will do it may not be. The rest is anybody’s guess.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter