Manchester City’s continuing dominance feels uncomfortably routine

What was strange about Sunday’s Manchester derby was how routine it felt. When Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953 it was a scoreline heard around the world, the death knell for any lingering sense of English footballing pre-eminence and confirmation of the excellence of Gusztav Sebes’s side. It opened the most complacent eyes to football’s new era and, even in those free-scoring days, it was a result unusual enough that to speak of “the 6-3” was to conjure images of Nandor Hidegkuti shredding English pretension amid the Wembley fog.

Sunday’s 6-3 was, well, what exactly? Like the game in 1953, it didn’t seem anything like a full expression of the gulf between the sides: the team who got three should have felt simultaneously chastened at the magnitude of the defeat and very fortunate to have got away with only a three-goal margin. To read the reports from 53, to hear the accounts of those who played in it or were there, is to glimpse what it felt like to witness a paradigm shift, the dawning awareness, slow and then sudden, that nothing is the same any more, that everything you thought you knew has to be reassessed, recalibrated. Sunday had none of that.

Even at 4-0 before half-time, when it genuinely seemed that City might go on and hit double figures – the names of Adcock, Stewart and White, scorers of hat-tricks in City’s 10-1 win over Huddersfield in 1987, seemed for a time to whisper around the Etihad – what was striking was less how devastating City were, or how shambolic United than how routine this all felt. City are this much better than United; why should they not eviscerate them in this way?

This is modern football, when big scores are commonplace. This is City, who now average five goals per home