If you keep an eye peeled for Europe’s top tier, the English Premier League’s marquee match, frankly speaking, is scarcely a big deal.
England plod, and the best clubs of the country are not among the continent’s big boys. But hoopla was never even meant to mirror reality. It has an existence of its own, given assorted spin doctors’ 24×7 labours, and public discourse in the week after the mother of all Mancunian battles underscored it.
The 4-1 result was so widely deemed an incredibly anti-climactic surprise that, after the latest Manchester derby, all that most people, standees as well as grandees, found worth talking about was how thoroughly City had knocked the stuffing out of United. Drama, sharpened by the avalanche of goals, took over. Calm reflection was nobody’s priority.
City, true, have dropped from the top tier very often in the past and, in 1938, did so a season after winning the championship, but look up history and their hours of glory are not really few and far between. They have indeed had their fair share of it and with their pockets now bulging with petro-dollars, their ambitions have soared too. In the none too distant past, they handed Alex Ferguson a one-in-the-eye defeat neither the man nor his team would ever forget. This time around, having said, days earlier, that David Moyes’ Manchester United were beginning to look a bit of all right once past the initial, seasonal and transitional hiccups, the papers promptly united in singing paeans of praise for Manchester City. Victory, not for the first time in the history of humanity, was being claimed by an impressive majority. Manuel Pellegrini, though, looked, on television, more satisfied with a job pragmatically done than ecstatic, or euphoric in an exhibitionist way over a great feat accomplished with a lion’s bravery. He knew it was his counter-attacking ploy – essentially the chessboard game — that had won the day, even if the spectacular table-turning served in this dumbed-down age to dull analytical instincts where these were still expected. City shackled United around the midfield to begin with, and even though they were less active on the right side attacking flank than the left, their on- as well as off-the ball speed sufficed repeatedly to leave Manchester United
embarrassed at the back. Everything fell into place. City hardly put a foot wrong. Rather, it was Manchester United who looked wrong-footed in whatever they attempted, not that such action as they seemed capable of reminded anyone of Harry Potter’s magical possibilities. Robin van Persie’s injury-related absence was, of course, to be factored into the uninspiring show of serial ineptitude – they found it hard even to string together too many consecutive attacking passes – but that alone didn’t explain the collapse to its full extent. The unfolding season is likely to unravel more infirmities in them on major occasions but, equally importantly, Manchester City’s performance underlined some of counter-attacking football’s basic lessons. Their defensive organisation was deep in their own half, close-knit, with the rearguard always staying close to the goal. They used the dyke thus erected to pre-empt Manchester United’s build-ups and attacks and, very, very importantly, had their own defenders keeping the action in front of them. It may have left a lot of the game’s – as opposed to a club’s – fans wondering what the harvest would be when, say, Chelsea, managed by an equally safety-first Jose Mourinho, went up against them, home or away. Germany-versus-Czech Republic in the 1996 European championship? Not really, for the simple reason that league games are not always like knock-out ones. In a 90-minute game with no mandatory extensions, you can get by despite being mediocre. Also, quite unlike the Czech team in that stifling encounter, the Portuguese manager, having long anointed himself The Special One and been referred to as such by writers without a sense of history, is unlikely to dub his rivals the potential, rightful initiative-takers. Not in official Press conferences, though he said, earlier in the English Premiership season, that he was happy to have split points at Old Trafford. And there precisely is the rub.
Vision is not a tutorial priority; tactics, with all their implied emphasis on immediacy and very little beyond, are the chief managerial concern. La Liga held sway for some time and then Bundesliga trumped it. The battle took on a different dimension. The EPL sales pitch is quite different, though, and there is nothing that the fan – who may be glued to the box in southern or south-eastern Asia – can do about it. He is simply taken for granted. And slyly orchestrated falsehood wins the day.
