MANCITY GEARING UP FOR DOUBLE TREBBLE

Man City look forward to dominate all matches across all competitions for the season remainder

The three key players from last season’s treble-winning team, Kevin De Bruyne, John Stones and Erling Haaland, are all approaching fully operational status, and ready to appear on the pitch together for the first time since the Champions League final in June.

By Tuesday morning City were listed at 9-1 with the bookies not just to win the league, but to win a first ever double-treble. It is measure of this team’s unparalleled ability to win games while steamrollering any real sense of competitive variables, this still feels cautious; that a feat no other team have achieved seems like the default option, a thing that is more rather than less likely to happen.

First, what exactly is at stake? The answer is: sporting immortality. City have 16 league games left to play, plus a maximum of four in the FA Cup and seven in the Champions League. Perform to their capacities and they are within final surge of successive trebles, six Premier League titles out of seven and a coronation as unarguably the greatest team of the modern age.

City lifting the champions league last season

Football loves an ill-fitting comparison across the decades. Comparing success of now to the achievements of say, Jock Stein’s Celtic is a journey without maps or scale or context. Bob Paisley-era Liverpool? Golden-age Real Madrid? The Ajax of Johan Cruyff? The Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer? This is the kind of footprint City can leave in the next three months.

To many neutrals such success in the stratified modern game will carry a sense of economic inevitability, mention those 115 unresolved charges for breaking financial rules. City deny any wrongdoing.

But it is also worth remembering that nothing lasts forever. Guardiola will at some point leave and the perfect ripeness of the current team will edge into something else. This is City’s chance, right here, to gouge their hands right into this thing and suck the sweetness out.

City's name being engraved on the champions league trophy

Can anyone stop them? There is a vague sense that the opportunity may already have passed in the Premier League. To date City’s season has felt like a three-stage tune-up. Part one was a necessary fudge that saw De Bruyne and Stones injured and a Haaland-centred team still trying to play the Haaland-centred structure of last year, and stumbling in mid-season. Part two arrived with Haaland’s injury, which may even have been a blessing, as a functional 4-2-3-1, a more classically Guardiola-looking team with Julián Álvarez as the central striker, won 10 games out of 11. And now we have this: the key parts are fit and well, the Death Star is readying its destructor beam and is preparing to enter annihilation mode once again.