Humiliated champions Manchester City are in freefall
06 November 2024 7:09am GMT
It was not just that this marked Manchester City’s heaviest defeat in more than four years but that they looked, for the first time in Pep Guardiola’s eight-year reign, out of energy, out of spark, out of ideas. On a night when all eyes were trained on Ruben Amorim, the Sporting sorcerer saying goodbye to his heartbroken home fans, you could hardly ignore the desperation in the demeanour of his opposite number, incredulous at how the reigning four-time champions of England could have morphed within a week into such a rabble.
As Amorim was hurled into the air by his players and staff, sending him off to Manchester United with one of Sporting’s greatest European results, Guardiola had long since stalked off the pitch, sweeping down the tunnel with a face like thunder as he digested the indignity of losing a third straight game. It was an ordeal he had suffered twice before at City, but never in circumstances quite so scalding as this, with the irrepressible Viktor Gyokeres tearing his makeshift defence to ribbons.
Wisely, Bernardo Silva did not even attempt to sugar the pill. “We’re in a bit of a dark place right now,” he said. “Everything looks to be going in the wrong way.” His verdict reflected the crisis of confidence that has taken hold at City, with a once-freewheeling side who could prise opponents apart in a million different ways reduced to the palest shadows of themselves. Players of Bernardo’s pedigree do not throw around words such as “dark place” frivolously. A corrosive doubt has crept into the City dressing room. As if to symbolise the dysfunction, even Erling Haaland, the Nordic assassin usually unerring from 12 yards, cannoned a penalty off the bar.
City are in freefall, and reversing that trajectory threatens to be perhaps the most arduous struggle of Guardiola’s reign. Amorim outsmarted him tactically, demanding an unrelenting intensity of his players and lifting Gyokeres, latterly of Coventry City, to the level of a world-beater. The Swede adorned Amorim’s emotional exit with a hat-trick and could have scored more, so effectively did Sporting throw City off the stride. Such is the hallmark of a manager famed for never tolerating a dip in standards. His arrival in England promises to be quite the occasion – as does his first Premier League meeting with Guardiola on December 15, in the Manchester derby.
Guardiola can shelve any thoughts of that reunion for now. His first task is to arrest City’s tailspin, which has developed with bewildering speed. Ten days ago, when they replaced Liverpool at the summit of the Premier League, the stage seemed theirs to conquer afresh. But talk of a serene procession to a seventh title in eight years, never mind a second Champions League triumph, has been exposed as wildly premature. City are toiling, floundering, the errors in their play too elementary to be explained by injury problems alone.