Larry Ryan: How can 'boring' Man City entertain us if we want them to lose?
Manchester City midfielder Bernardo Silva (L) celebrates scoring his team’s second goal with Phil Foden against Manchester United at Old Trafford. City’s football has been branded ‘soulless’ and boring in recent months.
We’ll surely hear it Saturday evening at St Mary’s: Manchester City fans tweaking the ironic chant adopted at Arsenal in the George Graham days — Boring Boring City.
Unfortunately, if the columnists of the world reflect popular opinion, nobody but the faithful will be listening or watching.
There is considerable momentum behind the idea that City’s style of play is tedious, a narrative distinct from the fear that their domination is sucking competitiveness forever into a bottomless money pit.
In , Ken Early wrote of last week’s “clinical chloroforming of Chelsea” and snoozed at City’s “careful, disciplined, risk-averse football” — “better adapted to winning titles than admirers”.
On our own patch, Johnny Nicholson is unwarmed by football with the “soulless ice of technical drawing”.
Rory Smith is unmoved by a style so well-drilled it lacks any “jeopardy”.
Barney Ronay in the has grown weary of “supremely high-grade” but “pretty cold product”.
Jason Jones is fed up in the : “The dull march towards a footballing oligarchy, it’s all just a bit boring, isn’t it?”
In the , Eamonn Sweeney lamented City’s bloodless, classical perfection, “assured, clinical and a little bit boring”, concluding that “City are a team to admire but Liverpool are a team to love”.
And it’s hard not to take that as our start and endpoint of this debate. That the chief problem with Manchester City is they are inconveniencing the great loves of modern life, Liverpool and Manchester United.
When tackling this one, we can’t forget that one of the more boring title races in recent years — Liverpool’s 18-point canter — soaked acres of newsprint in tears of joy and emotion and relish for a new order that would endure for the foreseeable.
When considering this matter, it’s hard to escape how the vast football world tends to be distilled into how the big two are getting on. Just consider the cast of pundits on Sky. Or RTÉ’s grim determination to show the deadest of Liverpool rubbers even if offered rights to an alien invasion taking on Brazil 1970 at Tolka Park.
So it may be difficult for Manchester City to entertain the many people who want them to lose, given they tend to win. Let’s face it, anyone who says they find a football match watchable once the team they want to lose has gone two-nil up is lying. Maybe City are so good the switch-off happens at one-nil.
It might be fair to note, too, that even if you want them to lose, you mightn’t want it quite enough to make City the kind of compelling draw that, say, Chelsea were, under Mourinho’s watch, and with Brave JT forever stripped to the waist save a captain’s armband. Unless you can get yourself worked up over Fernandinho’s tactical fouling.
But still, it seems impossible to eliminate the eye of the beholder from our investigations on this one. It appears that a ‘crossfield diag’ is that bit more thrilling when it’s hit by ‘Trent’ rather than Kevin de Bruyne.
We could leave it there, this matter solved. But this page is occasionally bigger than that, so maybe we should look deeper at this puzzle, just in case. After all, you can’t tell people they are wrong to be bored, like you can’t make them enjoy .
Is it also that people can’t separate the ‘product’ on the field from the wealth that paid for it? That they feel dirty about being sportswashed?
Though you rarely hear of anyone switching off an Oscar-winner because of the ridiculous budget. Or because Joaquin Phoenix didn’t come cheap. Nor is there much analysis of how these things are financed.
Is it just because serial champions are boring? Dublin first sickened people, then became mundane, maybe even to themselves. Kilkenny hurlers the same. Stephen Hendry, Sampras, Serena.
Limerick might be allowed one more, though their ‘machine’ has already been accused of breaking hurling, the wristy stylist mown down by rampaging man mountains programmed by a systems administrator.
“I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good,” said Mies van der Rohe, the architect credited with pioneering minimal modernism. Mies shipped his fair share of ‘boring’ jibes in his day and his ‘less is more’ aphorism could be applied as readily to Pep’s City.
Stripped of indulgence, built on structural integrity, yet breathtaking in the scale of its ambition. Pep has literally moved the game’s goalposts so the challenge is not just to prevent goals but prevent the opposition enjoying meaningful touches in your half.
The geometry involved no doubt turns some off, this talk of Pep dividing the pitch into 20 zones, players asked to constantly plot their coordinates on a matrix. It’s almost collective snooker, attacks as break-building, always four passes ahead, opponents forever tucked tight to a cushion.
But is it taken for granted, how tuned in even the world’s best footballers must be to make that work? And how persuasive you must be to keep millionaires that tuned in? The jeopardy is evident once they try it at the highest level in the Champions League.
And the connections between men like Phil Foden and Bernardo Silva, however guided by geometry, are surely more enduringly beautiful than any glass skyscaper.
“God is in the details,” was also attributed to Mies. But as he duly heard from his critics, today’s spacious elegance is tomorrow’s dull, destroyer of tradition. Discouraging Jack Grealish dribbling up blind alleys is Pep’s answer to abandoning ornamental brickwork.
Of course what City attempt every week — the blizzard of triangles and one-twos — would once have been regarded as impossibly ornate. It says much about Guardiola’s influence on the game that it could ever be regarded as tedious.
Now that anybody any good accepts that you’re better off keeping the ball than just knocking it, that your centre halves should split and your full-backs should push high, there is a certain nostalgia out there for the old quarter-to-five ball to the big lighthouse.
And as for everything else, from the lack of crack Eastern European sides winning the European Cup to the intolerance of an old-school reducer, it’s easy enough to lay all our laments for modern football at City’s door.
