At some point in the past three years the Premier League’s marketeers and chief broadcasters discreetly called time on the habit of describing England’s top tier as “the best league in the world”. No harm in that, of course. Best is a tough gig for anyone. In the seasons since the next-best option for the masters of hyperbole has tended to be “most entertaining” or “most competitive”. Well, this was certainly both of these: a high-tempo, high-drama mess of a match between two well-resourced champion teams that have divvied up the Premier League title between them for the past four seasons.
In terms of quality and precision, though, this was at times an occasion where both teams appeared to be playing from some vaguely glimpsed blueprint. Across Europe the last eight days have brought El Clásico in Spain, Der Klassiker in Germany and now this, the Premier League’s own version, a derby match between the current Champions and the big spenders du jour that is probably best described on this evidence as the Messico, the Faffico, the Collapsico.
It is, of course, harsh to criticise City for failing to win more emphatically against 10 men when they created enough chances to do so and surely would have had the general sense of imprecision not also infected the referee, Michael Oliver, who three times failed to give City a penalty when they might have expected one.
At the same time United’s supporters will be heartened by the performance of their own team, who managed the notable feat of both collapsing and simultaneously not collapsing, all-but falling to pieces for 20 minutes either side of half-time, but still playing out the match with commendable spirt exemplified by the chugging determination of Marouane Fellaini in central midfield.
Still, though, it is hard to avoid the impression that the City of last season, or indeed any genuine European heavyweight would have run straight through a United team that lost Chris Smalling on 39 minutes to a second (witless) yellow card and then the injured Marcos Rojo on 55 minutes, and played the last third of the game with an already makeshift defence reduced to pegs, brown paper and string.
Instead of which a group of high‑class players charged at each other for 90 minutes here with all the cool, collected precision of the world’s most outrageously talented pub footballers trying run off a Jägerbomb hangover. Elite-level football is often described as a game of chess, but this was closer to a late-night round of contact dominoes.
On a crisp sunny autumn lunchtime a strange first half had seen United start with an illusory brightness and ended with City steadily taking control, probing at those collapsible points in that half-finished defence, but still seeming to do little more than shadow box patiently while United prepared to punch themselves in the jaw.
Which they duly did with the departure of Smalling. This was a doubly self-inflicted red card. Smalling’s tackle on James Milner was rash; the attempts at a tackle on Yaya Touré by Fellaini and Daley Blind that left Smalling lunging across towards the ball were equally poor.
The goal when it came was a moment of welcome ruthlessness in a game crying out for an uncluttered mind.
Albeit the move that brought it was so straightforward, the gaps left so large that had it been a set up on professional wrestling some of those watching might have felt a little uneasy. With United’s defence not just square but pegged apart like table footballers Touré played a fine pass inside Ángel di María, Gaël Clichy’s cutback was precise and Sergio Agüero’s finish empathic as ever.
And that, as it happened was that for a match that might have ended 5-0, 7-2, 1-1, or pretty much any other score you might care to point a stick at. Agüero looked unhappy to be taken off as the game raged into its final knockings, but it seemed fitting he should apply the one moment of decisive quality in a match that might more accurately been billed as the Classic-ish or the Classic-esque, or the Second Class-ico.
This is not simply Premier League-bashing, more an objective gauge of comparable team strength and star wattage. The fact is the two teams here, Champions for the last four seasons, contained only one man with a World Cup medal (Jesús Navas) and three players who have won the Champions League. La Liga’s big day last weekend featured seven World Cup winners and 17 with a Champions League gong, while Borussia Dortmund versus Bayern Munich on Saturday night featured 10 of the former and eight of the latter. Similarly the top two games in Spain and Germany offered an entire combined midfield, attack and goalkeeper with a reasonable case for winning the Ballon d’Or this season. Of the talent on show here Di María and Touré might have a case of their own. This is simply the Premier League way of course, an environment where teams are not so much built or grown as violently thrown together. For United the issue is surely not so much the quality of those involved as the sheer choppiness, the air of panic, with which attempts have been made to build a team in the past year, after the trophy-laden entropy of the late Ferguson era. Here Louis van Gaal’s defence was obviously undermanned, but the midfield too remains, for now, a matter of hurling a collection of top-class players at a wall and hoping a few of them stick.
City, for their part, have simply looked a little off key recently, and perhaps a little under-resourced in forward positions as the demands of balancing the books take hold. Both teams will take heart from the result in their own way, and both will no doubt improve from here. But this was hardly the kind of stuff that will have Europe’s own superpowers – or indeed the current Premier League leaders – quaking in their boots.
