You can take our freedom. But you’ll never take our largely routine domestic cup victories! On a fun, occasionally full‑throated afternoon at Wembley, Manchester City extended their hugely impressive winning run to six of the past seven domestic trophies.
At times City seemed to doze a little at the wheel. Aston Villa played with heart and might have made it 2-2 at the death. But there was a fleeing always of the domestic trophy juggernaut, holding its opponent at arm’s length.
Most of all there was a performance of ethereal grace from Phil Foden, who played brilliantly at the start when the game was there to be taken, who had five shots at goal, completed 46 of his 51 passes, dribbled around pretty much the whole Villa team, and showed an alluring command of the space around him.
Foden has been slowly clarifying for the past year or so. His talent has never been in doubt. It is more the question of whether he has those hard edges to bring it to bear, or indeed whether he will get the air to breath in this winning machine. How much football is enough football? Have his horizons been preserved, or even shrunk by that extended apprenticeship? One thing is clear after this performance. He really does need to be out there, being stretched and refined, finding the outer limits of his own extraordinary talent.
There were some lovely moments. With 26 minutes gone Foden ran towards a pass from Rodri on the edge of the area and took a touch of the ball that is best described as supernatural – killing it, stunning it, tasering it, leaving the ball nuzzled on the edge of his toe as he ran, then shifted sideways to shoot past the far post.
Foden had already helped to make Manchester City’s opening goal on 19 minutes, heading Rodri’s floated pass inside for Sergio Agüero to bundle the ball home. Rodri scored the second soon afterwards, nodding in from Ilkay Gundogan’s corner, a goal scored with no resistance, no friction, no sense of other bodies on the pitch.
At which point the game died on its gurney for 20 minutes. Villa sat deep. The black shirts moved, threading their patterns. There was a sense of mild sadism about all this. How long is a football match? I mean, really, how long? To see a world in a grain of sand. To feel the endless deserts of all recorded time stretching out either side of you while Fernandinho plays a sideways pass to John Stones and Jack Grealish runs around looking for imaginary space, an opening, a way into the day.
Wembley had been a boisterous place at kick-off, as it always is on these flag-day Cup finals, for all the talk about sterile grey corporate husks (see for detail: any England game). Guardiola had rotated his team again here, replacing some very good players with some other very good players. Here come the fill-ins: a £50m centre‑half and the best young ball-playing midfielder in England.
And yet for a while there was a sense City’s players wanted this game to be over. There was a slackening of air, a sense of the day congealing. As half-time approached Villa were playing with more rage and more edge. They deserved their goal, scored by Mbwana Samatta.
Foden was City’s best player throughout all this, running the game at times from inside right. He looks leaner, stronger and more athletic. He has a lovely medium‑range passing ability, the feel for weight and pace and trajectory that lets him roll the ball into the feet of a runner or find the space behind the space between the moving bodies.
With seven minutes gone he did something delightful, spinning away from two players in midfield, somehow retaining the ball, weaving inside, yawning off a pass. Later he sprinted 30 yards with the ball, gliding left and right with that pond-skater style. There was a casual, clever, too-intricate touch, something a bit “academy ground” as Gundogan found him with a long pass on the edge of the box.
Understandably perhaps. Before this game Foden had played 120 minutes of football since 4 January. Will he be ready for the summer and a return to Wembley at the Euros? The answer, of course, is yes. Foden looks made for the rhythms, the slow technical style of international tournament football.
Without context, to the first-time Martian viewer, it might come as a surprise that Raheem Sterling, the man on the other wing, is seen as a certainty to start England’s opening game, Foden just a callow outsider. Foden has his best days all ahead of him, has none of Sterling’s numbers, his proven weight. But he also has a dizzying range of gears to his game, that sense, seen in glimpses, that this is a player who can pretty much do anything with a ball at his feet.
As the final whistle blew City were holding on a little. The players sank to the turf. There was a tableau of familiar bobbing-huddle domestic trophy joy. Foden will remember this more than most.
As with everything City do right now his performance also felt like a kind of rebuke, a statement of defiance – so, so much defiance – in self-made adversity. Look! We can make players, too. Behold the human face of our nation-state endeavours. Whatever happens from here, wherever this strange, uncharted, oddly furious journey leads, the future looks Foden-coloured.
