Don’t trust the process: why Guardiola may unleash Haaland against Arsenal

W aking from a dream, exhausted by his studies, struggling, for now, to channel the force, Pep Guardiola looks up through the misty combat cave and sees his arch adversary Mikel Arteta striding towards him, lightsaber already unsheathed and cleaving the air.

Pep leaps up in fear, attacks and strikes down his nemesis. Stepping forward tenderly, he stoops to see the human face of his fallen foe. But peering through the hole in that shiny black plastic Lego hairpiece he sees instead: the face of Pep Guardiola.

Well, that’s one way it could have gone down. For so long this season the challenge of Guardiola’s four-times champions has seemed to centre around hauling in his former pupil at the top of the table, while simultaneously becoming something else, absorbing the new tactical rhythms of Erling Haaland.

A cultural reboot, a seven-year itch, the struggle of the team that love to pass to incorporate a brilliant player whose one great weakness is, basically, not being very good at passing. A trip to face Arteta’s youthful team seemed like the perfect dramatisation of that battle, a chance to strike down in the flesh that younger version of himself. This was going to be the story of Wednesday’s top-of-the-table meeting at the Emirates.

Except we have this. The Empire has struck back, in the form of the Premier League’s case against City’s owners. And Guardiola has some less abstract adversaries to fight. There is also a way of seeing this as a footballing, tactical challenge, as well as an existential issue, a conspiracy issue, a chance to defy the cartel and all the rest of it. Perhaps these two strands are about to coalesce.

Sunday’s home win against Aston Villa felt different in more ways than one. The most obvious was