Manchester City’s perfection is laced with coldness and unease

S hortly after the 4-1 evisceration at the Etihad Stadium on Wednesday night, a title decider that felt at times like an entirely self-contained event, Manchester City’s players simply having a conversation with themselves, Arsenal’s Twitter feed posted 30 seconds of approved Aaron Ramsdale apology content.

Ramsdale thanked the fans. He spoke nicely about the need to keep on keeping on. In a moment of arch, algorithm-driven satire this post was accompanied by a sponsored advert for something called “the New Melts”, a horrific-looking pizza-style food product, pictured in grisly closeup sagging out of its cardboard skin.

True to form there was plenty of this in the replies, the conviction that Arsenal’s performance had indeed been a melt, a collapse, a choke, the sporting equivalent of a kilo of grease-drenched artery-clog drooping on to the arm of your sofa.

Did Arsenal choke at the Etihad? Was this something as recognisable, as familiar, as the bottle job and the no-show? Arsène Wenger said a good thing in the buildup. In the past few weeks Arsenal have begun to think about how to win. Before that the players thought only about the process, the system, not the outcome.

Whereas City are by now all process, a champion team that know how this should feel, that will celebrate a successful team press, will concentrate simply on lines and angles and drilled moves. Winning is a skill. You learn how to do it. Arsenal will be back. Ideally with more centre-halves.

Does this sound enough? By the end that 4-1 defeat certainly felt like something more basic. To choke is to have agency, to have a decisive say in what happens to you. Mikel Arteta’s team went to the Etihad as league leaders and spent 90 minutes being marched around