This article is a little OTT, but City are still holding all the aces

A strange old memory came into the head at Stamford Bridge. It was of
the misguided rush to dash off obituaries of Ernest Hemingway, the
great analyst of grace under pressure, when his aircraft crashed and
burned in the African bush.


Prompted was the hope that mere followers of the Premier League
should avoid a similar mistake now that the same fate has overtaken
Manchester City. Being excluded from the Champions League and losing
their first league game of the season in less than a week was at the
very least careless but it shouldn't deflect us from the plain truth. It
is that City remain the best, most talented team in England and one
that is extremely likely to remain so beyond the last day of the season.
They
have reserves of exceptional strength in every outfield position and if
you doubt this you may not have dwelt on the cast list of replacements
manager Roberto Mancini had sitting beside him. It included Samir Nasri,
Edin Dzeko, Adam Johnson, Kolo Touré and Nigel de Jong. This was
Mancini's back-up battalion. To many dispirited rivals it must have
looked like their idea of a task force.
Much more remarkable,
though, was the quality of performance City conjured while Chelsea were
still adjusting – extremely well, as it turned out– to some stark
evidence they were in well over their heads.
Chelsea may have
huffed and puffed and eventually achieved an impressive victory but more
than anything it was a triumph of will crucially assisted by Gaël
Clichy's double yellow-card frenzy and the much earlier, inexplicable
decision of the referee to ignore the blatant foul on David Silva by
Jose Bosingwa in the penalty area.
This fine effort of Chelsea
yielded three points and granted coach Andre Villas-Boas still more
breathing room in his attempt to remodel his ageing team. But did it do
any more than ripple the surface of City's continued potential to play
the most devastating football in the land? Not if you reflected for a
little while on this big game, how it started and how it finished.
It
started with some of the most sublime examples of individual skill and
balanced team work we have seen in domestic football for some time and
it finished with 10 men fighting to contain a resurgent XI.
This
is not to slight nine days of excellent Chelsea resistance to the idea
that their season was on the point of disintegration. Victories over
Newcastle, Valencia and now City constitute not so much a kiss of life
as a full-body wrestling of the idea that Villas-Boas is heading
inevitably for the fate of every Roman Abramovich appointee except Guus
Hiddink. But if we praise Chelsea legitimately it should be at no cost
to any sense that City remain in charge of their destiny. Right now they
have four potential players of the year, five if you count Vincent
Kompany's metronomic capacity to build one impeccable performance on top
of another alongside the showier claims of David Silva, Sergio Aguero
and, yes, Mario Balotelli. Yaya Touré's potential to wield huge
influence in the title run-in, as he did in last season's push for
City's breakthrough win in the FA Cup, can hardly be discounted,
assuming he looks at the film of his somewhat brutish treatment of Juan
Mata this week and spends the necessary time in front of the bathroom
mirror.
This is an impressively broad sweep of form and daunting
accomplishment in a single dressing room and should still make City the
envy of all their Premier League rivals.
Balotelli? If the world
often seems to him a pretty much unfathomable mystery, and if he
continues regularly to challenge Mancini's apparently unshakeable belief
that he is worth all the trouble, it is increasingly easy to see why
the manager decided to adopt a most difficult son. It is because for
every indiscretion, each new loony tune, he produces moments of stunning
redemption.
The one on Monday night was especially convincing. It
challenged us to believe that a man who might just organise a firework
display in his own bathroom was capable of the untouchable serenity he
displayed while linking with Aguero for a goal which defined the
immensity of City's creative possibilities.
Also difficult to
absorb is the fact that it was only last season when Mancini brought his
team to places like Stamford Bridge, the Emirates and Old Trafford with
all the reluctance of one of those snail-like schoolboys. His game plan
did not amount to surrender, merely the pursuit of a goalless truce.
City
now inhabit a different world. It is not without its dangers, even with
the disruptive force of Carlos Tevez so effectively neutralised by
Mancini. For some of us there still has to be the lingering doubt that
you can pack a single football club with so much high-priced talent, and
limited playing opportunity, and be sanguine about your chances of
avoiding periodic eruptions. Still, though, the most relevant point of
judgement is on the field.
This means that we should avoid overreaction to City's crash landing on the Fulham Road. Certainly, we should hold the obit.