City’s guts prove priceless

Manchester City paid £38m for Sergio Aguero because he is a player that can perform rare feats of brilliance with a football.

Yesterday Aguero did something more than that. With his desperate burst of inspiration at the moment of truth, Manchester City’s title was transfigured. Aguero transformed an economic inevitability into a sporting miracle.

With 90 minutes on the clock, City were already broken; doomed men shuffling towards a humiliation so absolute that it might have crushed the team’s spirit for good. Losing at home to 10-man QPR to throw the title into the hands of rivals they had beaten 6-1, such a monumental failure would have been an albatross hanging around City’s neck forever. No matter what trophies they gathered in the years to come, they could never have escaped the stench of that eternally stinking, decomposing albatross.