Throughout this game, Pep Guardiola patrolled his technical area in a thick, padded, hooded winter coat, hunched against a moderate March chill. A few yards to his right Plymouth’s Miron Muslic seemed to be radiating his own warmth, wearing a flimsy gilet over a thin, cream sweater. The point being, even Muslic’s clothing was optimistic, a refusal to submit to the obvious and unavoidable. And so too his team, for all that in the end they could not quite outrun it.
For a while it felt as if Plymouth were controlling the game, inasmuch as it is possible to do so while enjoying 25% of possession, being 39 league places below your opponents and demonstrably worse than them in almost every metric. They rarely looked stretched or panicked, always seemed to know what they should be doing and where they should be doing it. Inferior teams can often hold opponents at bay for a while, throwing themselves into sprints or towards the ball, tiring visibly with every desperate, wild effort. This was not that. This was a team in balance, clearly beautifully prepared and motivated, rising to an occasion that might have humbled them as it has ruined many others.
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City created chances from open play, hit a post, tested the keeper, kept on humping efforts over the bar, but until Kevin De Bruyne capitalised on the visitors becoming desperate and ragged in the very final minutes they had scored only with headers from set pieces.
This was interesting not only because they were playing Plymouth, but because in many ways this Plymouth are a team in the very early stages of construction, little more than some scaffolding and a blueprint. Their manager was appointed in January, one player was making his full debut and two of the three centre-backs, one of them the captain, were starting just their sixth games for the club. The left-back, at least during the first half when he was more often in the vicinity, had to keep popping back to the bench so a coach could flick through laminated pages of a ring-binder to show him what he should be doing.
They produced a performance that gradually chipped away at any pre-match cynicism engendered by the monolithic challenge they were facing, and by the prospect of a game whose outcome, if not its rhythm and cadences, had always felt not so much likely as certain.
The buildup hardly raised the spirits. Groups of day-tripping away fans strolled around town in various shades of green, some of them touting inflatable aliens to boost the head count, but few can have travelled in either hope or expectation. Once at the ground the countdown to kick-off at the Etihad Stadium is an exercise in profit-maximisation that feels particularly jarring given the club’s already extraordinary wealth. Some fans pay a bit extra for a pitchside view of the warm-ups, others for the chance to stand in a photograph alongside the referee and captains. All 22 players walked out with a mascot, while a separate squad of 25 replica kit-clad children waited nearby for momentary interaction with the handful of players who made the effort to walk over to them.
And at the end of this the curtain is raised on a theatre of broken dreams, a footballing sausage grinder where in the recent past the game’s offcuts have simply been turned into mincemeat. This was City’s 19th successive victory in FA Cup games against teams from lower divisions, the aggregate score now standing at 72-10 with some mercilessly savage beatings handed out along the way. Into this walked a team that had won one away game in all competitions this season, that had been winning away for just 10 previous minutes.
In Nikola Katic and Maksym Talovierov Plymouth appear to have acquired two centre-backs who are not just defensively sound but almost comically enormous. As the pair of them stood in the penalty area while the Pilgrims prepared to take a 38th-minute corner, sadly for their prospects of victory their only one of the game, City’s players looked almost pitiful in contrast. Even more so when Matthew Sorinola picked out Talovierov, blond hair tied in a ponytail and looking like a slightly slighter Erling Haaland, and it turned out that he could jump, too.
With half an hour to play and the scores still level Plymouth started taking off their best players, notably the excellent forward Mustapha Bundu. A performance like this at Hull on Tuesday and they will move out of the relegation places.
“We gave them a proper game. One of the best teams in the world, coached by one of the best coaches in this sport,” said Muslic, a man who seems as warm as his personal microclimate. There is never joy in defeat, but in its way this was quite inspiring.
