How is Manchester City like a bus?
In what way, or indeed ways, is Manchester City like a bus?
For a long time I thought it was odd that people kept asking me this somewhat leading question. It was strange, verging on perplexing, verging on suspicious. Every new matchday, without fail, this same Man City-bus question would come up, as if set off by some dark conspiracy, the source and aims of which I would never find out or even grasp tightly enough to take a guess at. And, worse, I would never know the answer to the original bus question. If I’m honest, it blighted my weekends.
Or, it did, until everything changed last Saturday, when City drew 2-2 away to West Ham United, and I finally got in on the whole dodgy analogy beneath the City-bus question. City isn’t literally like a bus, in the sense of having wheels or something, and nor is it like a bus in the Jose Mourinho sense of a team that sits deep near its own goal to defend, “parking the bus.” City is like a bus because every weekend you expect it to turn up to the title race and callously tear through all opposition, as it really should, but then it never does.
It’s quite a disappointing analogy, as it turns out—nothing ever lives up to a big build up, does it?—but nonetheless it does hint at a wider truth.
In a season in which Chelsea has imploded into insignificance, Arsenal continues to find new and innovative ways not to win having finally become theoretically good enough to do so, and Leicester City is the most unlikely leader of the pack in the history of the league (certainly heading into February), it’s right that many of us keep expecting City to charge through to first place and never look back. And yet it doesn’t.
The team with Sergio Aguero in it; the team which opened up this season with five league wins in a row, conceding no goals and scoring eleven; the team with its pick of the world’s best players; the only team of the current top four to have won the title in the last ten years: this team somehow isn’t strolling clear at the top, looking certain to grab a league title almost by default.
What’s happening instead is that we’re being strung along, kept hanging around, waiting, by just enough tantalizing hints that the City bus is coming, at just the right moments every time. Just as doubt starts to overtake the belief that City will ever turn up, something will happen that will drag the whole ordeal out a bit longer.
It started two games into the season, back in the days when we all still thought two things that we no longer think. One, that this would be a normal Premier League season. And two, that Chelsea would probably win the league. It was halfway through August and, suddenly, City had obliterated the title favourites (Chelsea) 3-0, with the effect being that its opponent was left utterly de-stabilized and it was left—we all thought at the time—ready to run away with the title, particularly after the three convincing wins it followed up with after thrashing the champions.
That version of events never materialized, though, as City ended up losing half of its games in September and being sucked back in with everyone else.
Was that the end of the line? No. We were conned again in October, this time more gradually, as City won all but one of its games in a month (only drawing away to Manchester United), this time with an aggregate score of 20-4 in its favour. “Surely now it will take this title for its own,” we all thought, only to be proven wrong again as the following month provided a similar comedown to the previous one. City only won once in the league in November.
Back and forth we’ve gone, more recently investing in City as likely title winners because of the failures of others, with Arsenal’s injury list prompting a downturn in form to leave Leicester City, again, sitting top. But the end result keeps repeating, as last weekend’s West Ham draw demonstrated perfectly: City nurtures huge potential, then gets its chance to activate that potential, then simply doesn’t. In fact, away at West Ham, without Aguero’s intervention it absolutely would have lost the game.
The whole thing is, for anyone who has any experience with buses, very bus-like with its endless cycle of hope and disappointment. The only real difference that comes to mind is that I’ve never seen Aguero on a bus. But there’s always time for that later.
And certainly there’s more time for City to continue to promise so much and give so little. With Arsenal’s bi-annual red card shambles against Chelsea confirmed, City lurks in second place behind Leicester yet again and we can all already feel ourselves believing that, yes, this time City really will turn up—and that’s exactly how it gets you.
Damn City. Damn buses.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter