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If you want to kill off any hopes that you might choke, and pass on the pressure to the team playing after you, then a comfortable 4-0 away victory does the job perfectly.
That is what Manchester City did at Fulham on Saturday as Arsenal wait to play Manchester United today (Sunday). It is what they do whenever they play, first or second.
How they do it is even more spirit-breaking. In their last seven Premier League games, City have scored in the opening 15 minutes six times. On the other occasion, they broke the deadlock after 32 minutes, but that was after 31 minutes of resilience from Nottingham Forest.
It was a similar story at Craven Cottage on Saturday. Fulham started brightly — to the extent that City did not have much possession for the first five minutes. Even in the minutes that followed, City could not set up camp in the home team’s half.
But that did not matter when Josko Gvardiol crashed into it, playing a one-two with Kevin De Bruyne and then tiptoed the rest of the way, sliding in the first goal and breaking Fulham’s (and Arsenal’s) spirits with it.
Gvardiol opens the scoring at Fulham early on… again (Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
It was much the same at Brighton at the end of April.
Brighton were doing well against City, playing through them at times, winning the ball high… and then City put together one of their usual passing moves to get them into the usual wide position, only to switch things up with Kyle Walker swinging in a cross for Kevin De Bruyne to score his first-ever Premier League header — a diving header at that. Seventeen minutes. Barely enough time for anybody watching and waiting for a City slip-up to get excited about.
Last weekend, Erling Haaland scored a penalty after 12 minutes to break Wolves’ resistance. The away side then rallied and City kept losing the ball for about 15 minutes, but then Haaland scored again to make it 2-0 after 35 minutes.
Against Luton last month, City went 1-0 up after two minutes with their third effort on goal, albeit all in the same move.
At Crystal Palace, they actually fell behind early, with Jean-Philippe Mateta scoring inside four minutes. That really would have stirred City’s rivals — which included Liverpool at that point too — especially as Pep Guardiola’s men looked rocked in those early exchanges. Very early exchanges, though, because De Bruyne flashed in a world-class equaliser nine minutes later and City never looked back.
City conceded early at Palace last month but soon hit back (Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images)
A few days earlier, Rodri put City 1-0 up against Aston Villa after 11 minutes.
It was the last day of March when City drew 0-0 with Arsenal and the world wondered if they had it in them to rally for another run-in. All of their matches since then have been mentioned above, with City not just beating everybody in sight but breaking those spirits and resistances early.
That will be part of the reason why plenty have already crowned — if ‘crowned’ is the right word — City champions. If people feel there is a lack of jeopardy in these games, it is probably because most people seem to think they are going to win, and then within 15 minutes City are 1-0 up.
And this is not a new thing: two years ago, when they were locked in a similarly nip-and-tuck title race with Liverpool, over a stretch of seven games in April and May they scored inside the first 20 minutes in six different games. Even more ruthlessly, they scored in the first seven minutes in four different games.
On one occasion, a home game against Brighton when they had to win to go above Liverpool in the table, City did not score at all in the first half and the Etihad Stadium was noticeably tetchy. Not that it threw City off — they scored three times in the second half — but it shows that those early goals can settle a lot of nerves when it is your team scoring them, and cause a lot of worry when it is your rivals.
There were two games — the last two — in which City not only did not score early but fell behind. They battled back for a 2-2 draw at West Ham and then, famously, beat Aston Villa 3-2 on the final day.
Manchester City have been known to leave it late (Visionhaus/Getty Images)
With two games to go this time, it’s a sign that things do not always go to plan for City. Although, as in that Brighton game two years ago, they just found a different way to do it.
The challenge in these coming games, against Tottenham and West Ham, is to do it no matter what happens. They seem ready.
“I have the feeling they like to play with pressure,” Guardiola said after ticking off one more game on Saturday.
“They are used to it. We have incredible personalities in the team, with Manu (Akanji), Ruben (Dias), Kyle (Walker), Eddy (Ederson) — the composure that he is playing with — and then Rodri and Kova (Kovacic), Phil (Foden), they enjoy playing with that pressure.
“Otherwise, you cannot give your best performance knowing that if you lose you are going to lose the Premier League. But this isn’t now, they have proved it for many, many, many years.
“But for many years, it is always the same: don’t think of anything other than winning the next game. Focus on that and after that, we will see what happens.”
(Top photo: Gaspafotos/MB Media/Getty Images)
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