FA Cup gives Kyle Walker a chance of worthy Manchester City endgame

For Kyle Walker Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final against his boyhood team, Sheffield United, may point towards the start of his Manchester City endgame.

The defender could suspect as much without knowing it – yet. A leitmotif of Pep Guardiola’s serial success has been a genius for keeping multimillionaire footballers guessing. The Pep Way decrees that no one is ever fully in, no one ever fully out. But for Walker, whose contract ends in June 2024 when he will be 34, a reading of the runes may tell him where a garlanded City career is heading under a ruthless manager who is the ultimate team-first operator.

Joe Hart, Yaya Touré, Sergio Agüero, Vincent Kompany, Raheem Sterling, Kevin De Bruyne and Riyad Mahrez are some of the stellar names who can confirm this – by the timing of their Eastlands exit or exclusions from the starting XI.

Walker’s fall in status from a starting berth has come in the past six or seven weeks as he experiences a fate that has befallen many under Guardiola’s tutelage. Dropped by the Catalan then publicly critiqued is a trope of this hyper-intense football man’s trophy-rich tenure.

Walker’s has been perhaps the most stark of all the Guardiola “constructive criticisms” offered to the media. Since the 2-0 defeat of Newcastle on 4 March, the champions have played eight matches and the manager has chosen him only twice – for last Saturday’s 3-1 win over Leicester and a 6-0 FA Cup drubbing of Burnley.

For two of the three key outings in this sequence – a 4-1 victory over Liverpool and the Champions League 3-0 first-leg defeat of Bayern Munich – Walker was granted zero minutes. In Wednesday’s 1-1 return at the Allianz Arena, he entered with 120 seconds of normal time remaining.

Deciphering Guardiola’s