City's Struggles Glow With Unmatched Glory!
Pep Guardiola’s team have ground down other title contenders in the past with their relentless winning streaks. But those days appear to have gone
Manchester City have had trouble in matches they would have won in previous seasons. Composite: Getty Images This has been a strange season for Manchester City. Every now and then, they’ve threatened to produce the sort of run that used to define them.
They won eight games in a row from the end of November to the end of December, then six in a row in February. At which point the tendency has been for a sort of mental muscle memory to kick in and to think that, even if they haven’t been playing that well, even if this doesn’t look like the City sides of old, this is the start of one of those relentless bouts of form that has ground down challengers in the past. After all, some of those past runs began uncertainly.
But this is a very different City. Even Pep Guardiola sounded bemused after Saturday’s draw with West Ham , noting how “in the past always we found the way to win this kind of game … this season, the fact that we didn’t score goals for the amount of chances, it’s punished us”. He seemingly had no explanation for that, muttering about the “unfairness” of the world that his side had not got the results he feels their football has deserved.
City have been oddly patchy, even within games. As has been noted regularly, their second-half form is much worse than their first-half form: if games ended at half-time, they would have 68 points this season; if they started at half-time, just 42; as it is they have 61. Some of the wins in those streaks look less impressive close up: they were extremely fortunate, for instance, to beat Leeds at home and Fulham away after second-half collapses.
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