Pep’s lonely City players sum up a side losing the sense of itself | Barney Ronay
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From 2-0 up, Manchester City crumbled in Paris and their manager was powerless to stop it. Slowly, and then all at once. This is how Manchester City collapse these days. Pep Guardiola once described his ultimate fever dream as a coach, the goal at the end of all this detail; which is essentially to have the ball for 90 minutes, creating his own frictionless Pep-world of total control. Well, that might just have to be parked for a bit. Probably best not to watch this one back for a while, either.
![[Bradley Barcola celebrates Paris Saint-Germain’s second goal]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d3553cf1dc8bb1109a59fd9f2a6f9b5b62d076c7/0_135_3310_1985/master/3310.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
At the Parc des Princes City produced one of the strangest performances of Guardiola’s time. Everyone has an off day. Human error happens. What stood out in, a second half during which City went from 2-0 up to 4-2 down, was how lonely the players looked out there, a team utterly losing the sense of itself.
Mainly it all just came from nowhere, arriving as a kind of social contagion. For 15 minutes City simply fell apart, collapsed like a rain-soaked cardboard box, an entity that suddenly had no resistance, no fibre, no sense of collective will. Teams are strange things. Even at this elite, hyper-prepped level they run on emotion and collective energy. And City have been the ultimate systems team, coached by a manager so brilliantly controlling that he will paint a chalk spot on the practice pitch and make Raheem Sterling stand in it, just to understand that loss of self.
And yet the human element will keep creeping in: 25 storeys up there are still ants in the carpet. This has been a feature of City’s recent run, a way of falling apart that feels like something more than missing parts, closer to an internal hysteria.
