Jack Grealish shows what he can do for Manchester City – if he gets the ball

You had to feel for Peterborough in a way. Make it through to the last 16 of the FA Cup for the first time in 36 years, bravely hold off one of the world’s best teams for an hour, and your reward? To get schooled by half a billion pounds’ worth of talent on your home turf.

But if the skilled resistance of Grant McCann’s team finally crumbled in the last half-hour, in many ways the real reward was simply to be here: in the shop window, live on primetime ITV, bumping Emmerdale off the schedules.

They will remember this evening at London Road for a long time; longer, at any rate, than Manchester City. It was a curiously scruffy evening for the champions, who naturally dominated possession but spent large periods struggling to create, gave up several good chances and only really lifted the siege later in the game.

Before all of that, however, there were some formalities to be dispensed with. It was in many ways a pre-match rich in symbolism, as Fernandinho poignantly handed over the captain’s armband to his Ukrainian teammate Oleksandr Zinchenko.

Peterborough, meanwhile, had prepared their own tribute, sending their club mascot – a human-sized rabbit named Peter Burrow – running around the pitch before kick‑off, bearing a Ukraine flag in one hand and swinging a giant carrot with the other. Of all the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, this was perhaps one that nobody saw coming.

The City fans gathering outside the cathedral from late afternoon had wasted no time in camping out in Peterborough territory, and nor did their team as soon as the game started. In a way, City did what they do with virtually all their opponents: they played as if they didn’t exist. Indeed you occasionally suspect that for Pep Guardiola the