The good news is that, unless José Mourinho has turned up looking dishevelled, the Community Shield very rarely means anything. Every year we go through the rigmarole, sifting the entrails for clues to the season ahead and most years whatever omens are there turn out to be misleading: Arsène Wenger never did get his mojo back, Tom Cleverley was not the midfielder England had been waiting for and Andriy Shevchenko was not a guarantee of goals. But 2015-16 did turn out to be a weirdly bad season for a weirdly disengaged Mourinho.
The bad news is that, if this Community Shield does mean anything, the future does not look especially bright, at least for anybody outside Leicester. Their fans will quite rightly celebrate another trophy – that’s a clean sweep of domestic silverware for them now over the past 21 years, success that would have seemed implausible at any previous point in their history – and they can take great heart from the performances of Ricardo Pereira and Harvey Barnes, both of whom missed significant chunks of the last season through injury.
But this did not feel like a Wembley showpiece; less an invigorating aperitif for the season to come than wearily minesweeping the dregs of other people’s wine at yesterday’s wedding. Perhaps it didn’t help that it was up against the Olympics and a Test match, but the sense of major tournament hangover was profound. Everybody still seemed exhausted – and that included the fans.
This was the first major football match played without attendance restrictions in England since before the pandemic began 18 months ago. It could have been a moment of euphoric release, of another aspect of life returning to something approaching normal, but it was not. Although around 19,000 Leicester fans were there – for them games of this notional magnitude remain a novelty – Wembley felt half-empty. This was the first game since fans began to return at the end of last season when those who weren’t there were more noticeable than those who were.
Perhaps the various Covid protocols – the need for a negative lateral flow test, the increased difficulty of travel, the fears that the chaos of the Euros final at Wembley may have helped spread the disease – put people off. Or the problem may be more fundamental and longer term than that: it’s possible that a point of saturation has finally been reached.
Pep Guardiola had perhaps finally noticed everybody rolling their eyes when he described the Community Shield as a trophy, duly picking a notably weakened side. (He also followed the Mourinho rubric of signalling lack of concern about the result by wearing a creased white T-shirt: very much dad at B&Q rather than tactical svengali.) Not a single one of his starters had played in the quarter-finals of the Euros or later. The result was what you might expect from a shadow Guardiola side: they dominated possession but lacked the penetration to transform control of the ball into goals. But given it’s unlikely more than five or perhaps six of this side would start a Premier League game together, that doesn’t really say a huge amount.
The moment everybody was waiting for came after 65 minutes with the introduction of Jack Grealish for Samuel Edozie. Given the talk had been that Guardiola sees Grealish as a No 8, as somebody to operate as one of the flanking three central midfielders, it did feel mildly revealing that he should come on to operate on the left side of the front three. But given how many players were unavailable and the sense that this was more about getting minutes in the legs than anything else, it’s probably wise not to read too much even into that.
For what it’s worth, Grealish’s involvement was limited. There was one neat dribble and one smart pass inside the box and, if the fact that 8% of his touches led to possession being lost doesn’t sound like something that’s going to delight Guardiola, the sample size is extremely small.
Which is perhaps to say no more than that this was a game from which almost nothing was learned other than that Manchester City really didn’t seem to need it. There had been a fear that the Euros would be a tournament ravaged by fatigue, that players put through the mill of a condensed season would not be able to cope.
Those concerns proved unfounded, but at some point there must be a reckoning. Next summer’s break will be a week shorter than usual to accommodate the winter World Cup, with just eight free days between the final Premier League game of the first part of the season and the opening game in Qatar. By May 2023, leading European and South American players will have in effect squeezed three-and-a-third club seasons plus two major international tournaments into three years.
That is unsustainable (and there’s then the pointless expansion of the Champions League group stage to come from 2024). If some clubs feel they have to neglect certain games and certain competitions, it’s only understandable. The big worry for organisers from Saturday is that, for almost the first time, there is a hint that fans might be doing the same.
