City earn crown in game of thrones

And so a season which for so long defied logic was ultimately defined by it.

Like any good thriller, the Premier League title race kept us guessing almost right up to the end, only for the final act to confirm that, all along, it was the original chief suspect whodunnit.

If yesterday’s denouement engendered a feeling of anti-climax – with Manchester City casually dismissing West Ham and Liverpool labouring to mount a last-ditchchallenge before getting the better of Newcastle — it can only bebecause this season’s compulsive page turner was for so long such a raging tale of the unexpected, it virtually demanded that the most fantastic plot twist of all should erupt on very last page.

But it wasn’t to be. Liverpool might have wonderfullyover-achieved to finish second but, in the short space of time from Steven Gerrard’s stirring call for no slip-ups after the 3-2 victory over City to his own horrible banana skin moment in the 0-2 defeat by Chelsea, the spills cruelly eclipsed the thrills of a season to bothremember and regret onMerseyside.

My own tip at the outset had been Chelsea, based largely on theimagined Mourinho effect but, when it counted, not even theSpecial One could find a way to compensate for his side’s frugality in front of goal.

Yet for all that it was still a three-horse race going into the straight, there can no denying Manchester City were worthy winners. It’s easy to forget that, early on, they struggled to establish the winning habit away from home but the manner in which they finally closed out the job was probably no more than should have been expected of the wealthiest club with the deepest squad, the coolest, canniest manager, a handful of outstanding individual talents, the most goals scored (102) and, second only to Chelsea, the least conceded (37). By any measure, that’s a winning formula.

Few will contest Luis Suarez’s claim to the Player of the Year gong as that most precious of jewels in football, a great goalscorer and a scorer of great goals, but if Brendan Rodgers hadn’t managed to keep the Uruguayan at Anfield – and Sergio Aguero hadn’t succumbed to injury at the Etihad — I reckon it would have been a straight run-offbetween Yaya Toure and DavidSilva, the steel and style supremos who helped make City such adelight to watch in their pomp.

Although he comically coughed up an Own Goal of the Seasoncontender against Fulham, Vincent Kompany – who understandably relished scoring yesterday — was hugely impressive at the back, immaculate and inspirational in equal measure. Overall, in sharp contrast to the soap opera which finally did for Roberto Mancini, under Pellegrini the noisy neighbours were closer to what United had been under Ferguson, a smoothly functioning, well-oiled machine.

Much has been made of the Chilean’s calm, dignified demeanour but if he almost always spoke softly, he wasn’t afraid to wield the big stick, as Joe Hart found out, first to his cost, but ultimately, as intended, to his and the team’s benefit.

So ends the maddest and most magical of Premier League seasons. Two years ago, City crammed the improbable drama into a couple of minutes of stoppage time on the final day but, this time, the rollercoaster ride ran all the way from kick off on August 17 when Manchester United appeared to put up the ‘Business as usual’ sign with a 4-1 thrashing at Swansea City, David Moyes all smiles and the champions topping the table as if Fergie had never gone away.

From that moment on, pretty much every signpost of significance was misleading, the identity of the table-toppers changing hands 25 times, with Arsenal – yes, Arsenal! – at the summit longer than anybody else, for 128 days. Never mind the old ‘marathon not a sprint’ analogy – the 2013/14 season has been both marathon and sprint, with a few fences from the Grand National thrown in for good measure.

In any other year, City’s triumph and Liverpool’s renaissance would have vied for the headline story, but not in the season when Manchester United’s supposedly seamless transition under son of Sir simply came apart at the seams, the Chosen One transformed into the frozen one as the unforgiving cameras repeatedly captured Moyes in a state of what seemed to be psychological as much as physical paralysis in the Old Trafford dugout.

In a season when the top flight managerial casualty list reached double figures for the first time, even those of us who traditionally bewail that senseless cull were finally forced to concede there was something almost humane in Moyes being put out of his misery, even if the leaks ‘n’ tweets manner of his exit left only another sour taste.

The ferocious focus on the embattled manager also served to let his players off the hook to an unconscionable degree but, in truly abject performances such as the defeats by Liverpool and Everton and in the Champions League away to Olympiacos, United’s lack of top quality – I mean, seriously, how many of them would get into the Man City or Liverpool first 11? – was compounded by something that looked disturbingly like a lack of interest.

The now former champions’ sharp decline might have been the campaign’s most compelling sub-plot but – from the great escapes of Crystal Palace and Sunderland to Andre Marriner’s case of mistaken identity and Alan Pardew’s nut job — there were more than enough sensational twists and turns to make this season’s incarnation of the English game a worthy rival to Games of Thrones’.

At the end of it all Man City wear the crown but, even as we all pause to draw breath, the unsettling question arises as to whether mastery of the western isle will mean anything at all when the continental superpowers of Spain, Germany and France come calling again.

And that’s if Uefa’s financial guard dogs don’t get there first, of course.