Jack Grealish has not scored a Manchester City goal in more than a year.Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Perhaps the most startling aspect of Manchester City’s ongoing, real-time collapse, which continued here with a 2-1 defeat by a vigorous, happy-looking Aston Villa, is the lack of any sense of struggle, desperation, or even any real variation. You lost. Lose again. Lose the same way.
Eleven games and eight defeats into that run, nobody outside the players really has any clue how or why City have been reduced to what they looked like here, a team playing Dignitas football, always aware of that spectre in the corner of the room, already hearing the clank of the scythe.
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In fact, on this evidence you can add the players to that list, too. City were an absence here, the same silhouette, the same colours, but a team of straw men and hollow shirts. Maybe going to war with your own host body is actually quite gruelling. Maybe artificial constructs collapse more easily. This has been like setting fire to a plastic Christmas tree.
How to describe that anti-energy? Watching this City is like watching a team that hates football play like a team that loves it. Following the spells of meandering possession was like watching a robot vacuum cleaner bumping its way around a Japanese train station. Orderly, controlled, but also random and pointless.
There was at least something new here. For the first time City met opponents who genuinely seemed to be enjoying this, and in particular enjoying their physical edge. Ten minutes into the second half John McGinn took possession with his back to goal, sensed Ilkay Gündogan approaching and basically shoved his rump out, twerking Gündogan back on his heels, before spinning away with the ball.
Morgan Rogers ate this City team alive all afternoon, bullying the midfield and defence in strict rotation. Rogers is a brilliantly purposeful footballer, bruising in the challenge, prepared bring you in close and use his power. At one point in the first half Bernardo Silva tried to weave his way through close to goal and Rogers just bounced him off the ball, barged past Mateo Kovacic, surged away and was finally cut off at the knees by Manuel Akanji.
Rogers was also on the edge of City’s first-team squad when Jack Grealish arrived. And this game was always likely to end up another verse in the ballad of Handsome Jack, although perhaps not in the way he might have hoped.
Villa Park was a lovely, light, chilly space at kick-off. Pep Guardiola has reverted to his midwinter black parka, paired here with black trousers and shoes, striding the touchline like a Jedi on his way to a funeral. He started Grealish on the left for this game, and Grealish played quite well. He was urgent with the ball. He reeled off a series of shanked, scuffed and occasionally ballooned shots.
What kind of footballer is Grealish anyway? A creative one? Another blank here made it 36 games without a goal and three assists in a season and a half. His best times at City have come as a dead pocket on the left wing to rest on the ball for a bit. Otherwise Grealish has been reduced to a kind of tactical void. The maverick parts have been sanded off. What has replaced them?
Even a champion coach has blind spots. The inability to bring anything new from Grealish seems to speak to the wider way Guardiola has addressed the current collapse. Certainly the same things keep happening. With six minutes gone Villa did what teams do to City now, breaking at speed into the wide open spaces behind the midfield.
The goal came the same way 10 minutes later, made by a lovely pass from Youri Tielemans, for Rogers to gambol away. Jhon Durán took the ball, swivelled his hips to throw Stefan Ortega off balance and slid the ball into the corner.
City’s problems can seem like simple tactical maths at moments like these. First is a lack of pressure in midfield, leaving time for opponents to choose a pass. Chuck in a high line. Add in the lack of defensive pace to cover it. Plus a manger who refuses to compromise the method. There is a formula now for walking through this team.
But it still feels like something deeper. There is an emptiness to this City team, a feeling they have drained their own battery, aged together, grown tired of this together, done to themselves what they usually do to other teams.
Marco Silva has spoken about the way City drain your “emotional energy”. Imagine having to be them every time. Imagine never getting away from Guardiola, living the Pep life every day of every week. Imagine being Pep.
Some odd choices have been made along the way. Erling Haaland is City’s only prime-career star player right now. He’s also the world’s best very simple footballer. Haaland is football TikTok, the game reduced to its most more-ish, literal-minded element. Trying to re-gear a team around him is like trying to build an entire song around a 15-second nose flute solo. To see Guardiola trying it is a little bizarre.
The modern City has always been a cold project. Money plus talent plus intelligence plus bottomless reserves have created a run of semi-guaranteed success, freed from rough edges, a machine designed for winning. What happens when the world intrudes? Something that looks a bit like this, apparently.