Striker is getting better in a changing Manchester City team and in the sort of goal form to strike fear even into Arsenal’s elite defence
“Everyone was a machine.” But, you know, in a good way. With Pep Guardiola this is always going to be meant as a positive thing, a sign of a team starting to fizz.
These are benevolent machines: not so much joyless droid-football, more perfectly functioning jam factory assembly line, interlocking units, systems in perfect concert. A chess computer playing padel against a chess computer, coached by 25 even more powerful chess computers. A conversation about Bauhaus architecture in a New York food-science restaurant where dessert is a cube of fibreglass flambéed at your table by a hologram.
Something like that anyway. It is acceptable to get a little carried away, a little purple prose at the spectacle of a high-functioning Guardiola team. If only because Guardiola himself is such a paradox.
Here we have the ultimate control coach, whose ideal game of football is the million-man midfield plus infinite possession, but who is simultaneously gripped by an almost comical degree of unfiltered passion, leaping on the touchline, carving wild human shapes in the air with his cold metal robot hands.
