BACK in November the trope that Manchester City was ‘ruining football’ by making the league uncompetitive and boring was very much in vogue. That was until it became clear to one and all that Tottenham and Liverpool hadn’t received the memo so attention turned instead to denigrating the club rather than Pep Guardiola’s fabulous creation.
By happenstance the football leaks scandal gave the media all the ammunition it needed to discredit the sensational fare witnessed at the Etihad and beyond while Amnesty International’s criticism of ‘the UAE’s enormous investment in Manchester City’ ushered ‘sportswashing’ into the lexicon.
With this all leading to a bizarre plot-twist that had City fans having their character and morality questioned it was almost a welcome relief when a comfortable FA Cup final victory saw a return to the team getting it in the neck for being better than everybody else.
Alas this was an all-too-brief respite because you can’t very well admonish a side for residing on another planet to their peers when no football is being played so it was that a long summer of discord played itself out on social media as a coterie of truculent – and frankly obsessed – journalists wrestled with a fan-base to determine the condition of the club’s soul.
Mourinho says four teams can challenge for the Premier League title:
"Man City, Tottenham, Liverpool and then Man City's B team." pic.twitter.com/nVoeSzIyv0
— Goal (@goal) August 11, 2019
Almost immediately the wagons circled and several weeks in the conversations have well and truly run their course. Now any shots fired are made of recycled bullets. It was intriguing therefore to find out what type of tactical foul the media would next deploy in their forlorn attempt to stop City streaking away and establishing itself among the elite of the elite. Would it be a shirt-pull or a full-on hack? The answer partly revealed itself in two recently published articles of note that were remarkably similar in theme.
Aware that deriding City’s expenditure is now a fruitless exercise as the exorbitant spending of others has shown it to be positively shrewd in comparison and aware too that the team’s brilliance is quite simply undeniable the new line of attack is to awkwardly clunk every previous defamation together coupled with a rare acknowledgement of Pep’s revolutionary genius. To summarise both pieces postulate that it is precisely because of how good City are that they’re receiving so much flak and should they languish perennially in sixth ‘sportswashing’ would amount to a mild rinse. They have in essence been accidental architects of their own demise.
It’s an interesting take to put it politely and in both instances their own subjectivity is put up as established truth but let’s leave that and instead concentrate on the words they use when uncharacteristically complimenting City at the top of each article. They are a ‘remorseless winning machine’ says one. They are an ‘oppressively brilliant operation’ says the other. Talk about damning with tainted praise.
Such words are designed to diminish, a familiar tactic. It is an assumption of dominance as if that dominance is an inevitable consequence of…what exactly? It’s not lavish expenditure, even they attest to that. So 198 points were accrued over two seasons because City have an owner who interests Human Rights Watch? That is utterly illogical.
15 straight #PremierLeague wins for #MCFC
The only team to have bettered this? Man City!
The Pep effect! pic.twitter.com/5luDQIeVDT
— Unibet (@unibet) August 12, 2019
Regardless, the slights act as clues as to what we can expect to see prominent as a narrative this season, namely the reverting back to square one and City being damned for stripping the league of any fun or fairness and if you think I’m being premature here or paranoid let’s take a look at some of the descriptions of this weekend’s opening triumph against West Ham.
It was ‘brutal’. It was ‘merciless’. It was a ‘strangulation’. After a singular win the Telegraph have come out today and deemed City’s ‘near perfection’ to be ‘boring’ and equating their ‘5-0 whitewashes’ to the one-nils prevalent at Arsenal under George Graham. Before a ball was even kicked the BBC felt the need to ask the new Premier League chief executive Richard Masters if he was ‘concerned’ about City’s supremacy.
Now I ask you in all sincerity: which other champions at the apex of their sport receives such negative terminology? Brutal. Oppressive. Off the top of my head only Mike Tyson in his prime springs to mind – an infamously divisive figure – while elsewhere there are countless others – from Federer to Woods to Barcelona – who are lauded for their high achievements not damned for them.
Yet if the reversion to yawning at City’s exhilaration suggests their critics are stuck on a loop sadly the same applies to Blues too. Because should Liverpool or Spurs drop a point here or there in the weeks to come and City dare to top the table by a couple of points the end-of-worlders will shriek out and supporters will respond.
HAT-TRICK BOY ⚽️⚽️⚽️@sterling7
#mancity pic.twitter.com/2zM1UKkKKn
— Manchester City (@ManCityFra) August 12, 2019
They will point out Manchester United’s monopoly across two decades and ask where the reproval was then. They will highlight the closeness of last May’s title climax. By doing this it only plays into their hands. It makes their effigy manifest.
Instead I hope they follow my lead in laughing into their hypocritical faces. And I hope they get to enjoy this term as much as I intend to should City continue their extraordinary journey.
I hope this year is a procession. I hope City win all of their games and leave the rest trailing in their wake. I hope Pep, Kev and the lads eviscerate the Premier League because I am a supporter of the team in question and I absolutely will not apologise in a terribly British way for my team being briefly amazing because of some small men with agendas and bitter rivals.
I will fight through words and thought any and every spurious suggestion that Manchester City, the club are somehow morally bad. And I was relish and delight in how thoroughly good they are on the pitch.
If the others fall behind then tough. This is top level sport, not a parent’s egg and spoon race and what’s more it’s a sport that has always had a team to beat. When it was the turn of others they enjoyed it. I intend to likewise.
