For anyone looking for evidence that Manchester City are just a motley crew of mercenaries who don’t have what it takes to win the Premier League title, yesterday’s pictures of Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Adebayor being pulled apart on the training ground will have been manna from heaven.
The fact that it was two former Arsenal players rucking and a third (Patrick Vieira) having to get in between them the day before they travel to the Emirates will have added extra significance.
As the story broke, Sky Sports News reported it referring to “pictures circulating on the internet”, as though we were dealing with illicit images that everyone was aware of but no one would admit to actually seeing themselves. A kind of footballing ‘Two girls, one cup’, if you will.
City may be evolving into a truly major force before our very eyes, but they are still on a steep learning curve. The established big clubs are a lot more adept at keeping such incidents in-house, and journalists and photographers are seemingly institutionalised into not gleefully reporting every little chink in the armour of the traditional big guns.
The conclusion from this is naturally that City’s hastily assembled squad are bound to come undone against an Arsenal side operating in glorious cohesion fostered over years of steady development. Don’t believe a word of it.
As the Armchair Pundit put it, these kind of things only matter if you are doing badly on the pitch, and City can once again go level on points with United this evening following their local rivals’ 2-1 win over Stoke last night.
History may count against them – City have not claimed a win away at Arsenal since 1975, when Asa Hartford, Rodney Marsh and Joe Royle got the goals. The Clash wouldn’t even form for another year after that victory or, to give context for our younger readers, it’s more than double the length of Justin Bieber’s lifetime since they returned from Islington with all three points. That’s, like, forever.
Nowadays, meetings between these two sides are inevitably billed as a battle between the splurgers and the nurturers. This tag is underlined by the expected arrival of Edin Dzeko today to complete his medical and seal his £27 million move to Eastlands, while Arsene Wenger has ruled out any new additions to his squad in January unless cover for the injured Thomas Vermaelen became a matter of urgency.
Typically, Wenger stated in the build-up to tonight’s clash that he will always do things his way rather than adopt a big-spending, ‘no-risk’ approach.
He said: “You look at the number of players who cost £20m and do not even get on the bench at Man City, and £27m (on Dzeko) is not a risk. It is a risk for me but not for them. If you have £100 in your pocket and you put £90 on a blackjack table, you take a risk. If you have £5m in your pocket and you put £90 on a blackjack table, it is not a risk.
“You can also do it the way Inter do, or Manchester City do, they buy the best players in the world and it works as well. What I want to show is it works our way as well. It does not annoy me, as long as they respect the rules.”
Wenger has certainly been doing that. He will have no worries at all as the restrictions on homegrown players and financial fair play continue to tighten, although it is worth noting that, of the XI expected to start this evening, Jack Wilshere is the only player to have truly progressed all the way up through the Gunners’ youth ranks.
However, that is of course a case of splitting hairs, especially when you compare their position to City, who have lost £50m of talent ahead of this game in David Silva and Mario Balotelli but are barely weakened.
There are many reasons not to take City seriously – a catalogue of bust-ups, the Tevez exit saga, Garry Cook – but they are on their way to the top, and that is contributing to this season’s title being so open.
One of the best things about the emergence of City and Tottenham as bona fide table-top botherers is that there are many more big games to look forward to now.
For most of the past decade the only matches that really had big ramifications on the destination of the title were all played out between four clubs. The frequent staging of both games involving those four clubs on the same Sunday would only further make the spread of top action across the rest of the season even more sparse.
Now, however, every other week seems to bring with it a big match while, despite their demise, Liverpool playing one of the top five clubs this term is still a fixture worth watching. For now, at least.
You can disapprove of City’s finding the fast-track to success through Sheikh Mansour’s billions, but appreciate that they have played their part in this Premier League season being far more interesting then so many that have gone before it.
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