A Tale Of One City

Now it’s down to two, with Tottenham Hotspur’s first serious title challenge in aeons having been effectively killed off in the course of one extraordinary minute during a breathless, rollercoaster clash on the eastern edge of Manchester.

For those of you insane enough to have been otherwise engaged at the time, Spurs – having fallen 2-0 down to Manchester City – had staged a stirring recovery only partially attributable to the rank incompetence of City’s stand-in centre-back Stefan Savic, and looked like crowning the afternoon with a stunning 94th-minute breakaway winner which was steered millimetres wide of the target by arch-predator Jermain Defoe. About 30 seconds later, borderline insane loose-cannon City striker Mario Balotelli won – and converted – a penalty which keeps them in pole position to overthrow the Red Terror, though they are taking their proverbial life in their hands if they persist with Savic. The young Serb is visibly, painfully, calamitously out of his depth at this level, and had looked like a ticking timebomb long before his rudimentary error let Defoe halve the deficit.
The lavishly talented Balotelli, in his own way, is also becoming a liability. Earning and successfully converting the winning penalty shouldn’t obscure the fact that he had no right to be on the pitch at the time, having distinguished himself with a sickening stamp on Scott Parker’s head which somehow managed to escape the referee’s attention. A catalogue of untoward ‘incidents’ have thoroughly reinforced the initial impression that there is simply no way Balotelli can be trusted to keep his temper in check on the big occasions, of which City have many between now and May.
All the historical evidence suggests that we can probably expect United to stay in hot pursuit until the death, an impression hardened by the nature of their 2-1 win at Arsenal in a match of colossal importance: with ten minutes left, they faced the prospect of slipping five points behind, before the oft-maligned (and really rather superb) Danny Welbeck pulled the trigger after some fine wing wizardry from the reborn Antonio Valencia.
Player-for-player, this particular United vintage is the weakest since about 2006, but there is something hugely admirable about their collective refusal to knuckle under, and with the two leading sides still separated by three points (a small but substantial gap, especially given City’s markedly superior goal difference) the suspicion remains that the season’s final all-Manchester derby may settle the issue.
I could be honest here and state that I fully expect City to finish the job, on the basis that our noses are already in front and we have by far the better collection of players. But I know that to do so would be to curse the cause, and apart altogether from the issue of bragging rights, there is also the not-so-small matter of a wager waiting to be resolved which will either fund my summer excursion to Poland and hopefully beyond (if City win) or force me to put in night-shifts in the Phoenix Park to earn the readies for same (if United prevail). 
All known logic still points to the men in light blue. City’s advantage is particularly pronounced in the goalkeeping area, where Joe Hart continues to display excellent decision-making and instinctive reflexes. By contrast, United fans must surely now approach every game hoping rather than believing that either Lindegaard or De Gea will make it through the 90 minutes without fucking up.
United’s relative decrepitude in the creative midfield positions must surely be a mite disturbing for Reds fans, with the recalled Paul Scholes and his greying comrade Ryan Giggs – whose combined age is 75 – still shouldering the bulk of the responsibility. 
If Wayne Rooney were to sustain an injury between now and May, I would expect the bookies to cough up immediately without waiting for the formalities. But the Fergie factor can never, ever, ever be discounted, nor can the unshakeable levels of self-belief instilled in United by innumerable 97th-minute stoppage-time winners down the years. By contrast, City are now hitting that zone known to marathon front-runners as ‘the wall’, where dizziness begins to be accompanied by light-headedness and a sudden creeping terror that one wrong move could undo all the progress made to date. This is roughly the point at which Newcastle started to implode during the epic title race of 1996, incrementally pissing away a lead far bigger than the one City hold at present, and the Savic factor now adds a further dimension of terror. 
On a rare Sunday off which I’d naïvely pencilled in as a potentially relaxing occasion, my nerves were put through the shredder and I must have aged about ten months. Later on, I availed of the opportunity to wind down by watching every minute of the two Super Bowl semi-finals. I’ve been loath to eulogise about the joys of the NFL in this space, since I’m well aware that very few people on the side of the pond give the remotest toss. I will say this, though: if you’re a non-convert, you have absolutely no idea what you’re missing. 
It struck me again and again on Sunday night that this is, by a large distance, the most satisfying, intricate, immersive and rewarding sport I’ve ever encountered – better than football, better than rugby. (Only top-level hurling comes close, and still falls short). To engage with American football is to enter a world where hundreds of possibilities are alive on every single play, where the scoreboard can – and often does – take on a life of its own, where the league’s competitive balance is safeguarded by a wonderful redistributive system which ensures that every year, the weakest teams have first choice of the best emerging talent, resulting in (irony of ironies) a rich-get-poorer/poor-get-richer sporting ecosystem in the most unequal and rampantly capitalist society on Earth.
Contrast this with soccer in its present state in England and Europe generally, where the overwhelmingly vast majority of clubs labour away year after year in the knowledge that the best they can ever hope for is to keep their heads above water while developing players who can hopefully be sold at a profitable price to one of the mega-clubs. Or, if you’re very lucky, a posse of Arab zillionaires will invest in your club and elevate you to elite status, but even then, you’ll never quite be able to shake off the nagging feeling that it’s a hollow victory based purely on financial good fortune.
Even a Man City fan of three decades’ standing would be entitled to harbour serious reservations about the source of all this sudden success. But I’ll suspend them until May. In the interim, the Super Bowl will be on your screens on February 5. Give it a shot.