This City side is a bruising, concussive version of Guardiola’s template

When did it become not just clear but utterly unavoidable that Manchester City were winning this game? And not just winning it but offering up the most refined of sporting strangulations?

Perhaps it was the moment on 25 minutes when Rob Holding came skittering out wildly, like a drop of water on a hot pan, as Kevin De Bruyne hared in behind him, a moment of total positional panic, when the game just seemed suddenly to fall apart in the face of that sky blue pressure.

Perhaps the unravelling only really came with the fourth goal, Erling Haaland’s first of a night when he was, frankly, a little frightening: brutally good, but also oddly playful in the middle of all that bruising pressure.

But it wasn’t quite that either. The unravelling started in the opening 10 minutes, the opening five, perhaps the first few seconds, when suddenly the air seemed to have been sucked out through the stadium roof, and Arsenal were already panting, whirling, trying to find space and time, a foothold in this thing.

By the end there was a completeness to this 4-1 defeat of City’s only serious competitors in the league this season.

Pep Guardiola’s teams have always been about control, about mastering the space, giving an opponent no air to breathe. This is surely the most bruising, concussive, hard-running version of that template to date. City are thrilling to watch, but not in the fluid, decorative fashion of previous iterations. They came here with a plan. And that plan was: we are simply going to run through you. And when you have the ball we’re going to run straight through you too.

From that opening sky-blue swarm, City took Arsenal into a horrible place here. They didn’t let them leave.

And as City zero in on that treble, it is probably