Beauty of Manchester City shines through as clock ticks down to treble

Tick. Tick. Tick. At the end of this breezy, fun, quietly feisty 2-1 defeat of Fulham, there was even a sense of super-smart design in Pep Guardiola’s onfield displays of affection.

There was a double-hug for John Stones: both hands around the torso plus a final flurry of buttock pats for the key defensive peg on the current eight-match winning league run. Guardiola hugged Jack Grealish, just because he loves hugging Jack Grealish.

With Erling Haaland, who was again sensationally good here, he lingered a little longer in the embrace, all the while rabbiting constantly in the forward’s ear, combining even here the sensual‑but‑fatherly man‑hug with fevered instructions about working the high press.

Is it meant to feel this easy? Even in the tough bits? City are now top of the league for the first time since their second fixture of this never‑ending season. Fulham gave them a good game, but not a horrible one. And at the end of that nine‑month run to the wire, the kind of title race where more mortal teams might expect to splutter just a little, the endgame feels closer to a high-end tasting menu, a series of delightful small plates, easily digested.

This was still an afternoon to showcase two key parts of the treble‑push from here. First, the obvious attacking strength (clue: he’s Norwegian and tall). And second, the one semi-theoretical weakness that comes hand in hand with Stones’s supremely well‑executed role in the current defensive set-up.

Zooming out, perhaps the most significant moment of the afternoon was Fulham’s first‑half goal, which came from a route City will always have to manage and mitigate, the football equivalent of that pesky unguarded Death Star ventilation shaft the Imperial architects always seem to