The multibillion-pound mirage

While it was hardly Boca Juniors v River Plate at La Bombonera, Sunday’s eagerly anticipated match between Liverpool and Manchester City rated about 8.5 on the official Football Daily feist-o-meter by the Premier League’s comparatively tame standards. The visitors walked out to a loud chorus of pantomime booing and some mildly amusing banners reminding them of their serial cheating, there was some defiant “doing” of the Poznan in the away end and … er, that was about it. For all the faux media concern, one of the most hyped Premier League matches of all time passed off without anything much in the way of flashpoints. We’ve seen more rancorous, heated physical exchanges at the judging of the best Victoria sponge at the local church fete.

Following a first half that will probably live no longer in the record books than it will in the memory of anyone forced to watch it, City eventually won doing handstands after Liverpool were reduced to 10 men. The visitors’ fans, players and head coach have since been criticised for milking their win, although given the simmering hostility they were subjected to, their smugness in the face of emphatic victory was more than a little understandable. While it is true that the vast majority of City’s current players are not tainted by direct association with the financial chicanery perpetrated by their club’s owners until it came to a conveniently abrupt halt on the final day of the 2017-18 season, it is fair to say the presence at the club of many stars responsible for embarrassing Liverpool is not entirely unrelated to the skulduggery which preceded their arrival.

Away from the pitch, the most fascinating aspect of the match was the manner in which it was covered, specifically by a network that has spent decades insisting the now irreversibly tarnished product on which it spends and makes billions is The Best League In The World™. Perhaps having witnessed Joe Cole desperately mugging on City’s guilty verdict the previous day on TNT Sports, Sky had assembled its Heavy Artillery O’Punditry in Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Micah Richards and Daniel Sturridge. Each of them made a reasonably decent fist of toeing the fine line between condemning City for their cheating, without making the obvious observation that, for the past 17 years, their employers have been selling subscribers what many have long suspected was a massive lie.

“If you could take me off Manchester City games moving forward for the next few months until the verdicts have been heard, I would be absolutely delighted,” parped Neville. “At the end of the game it is quite hard because you are imagining, basically, if these guilty verdicts are confirmed, there is going to be a huge cloud hanging over the whole league.” Obviously, the irritating pedant in Football Daily behoves us to clarify that the guilty verdict has already been confirmed, but is now simply subject to appeal. In the meantime, we are left watching a multibillion-pound mirage where every match featuring City feels like that McFly family photo in Back to the Future, with various games, goals, trophy lifts and victory parades fading in and out of existence until we get a final, definitive decree.

Join Daniel Harris at 8pm BST for hot Premier League updates from Coventry City 1-2 Newcastle United.

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