Liverpool – Bulletproof Truth

Walter prays for progress, spirits agree

“The journey between good to great is short, but it’s the hardest part of the journey to make.” – Rob Walter

Telford Vice / Johannesburg

MINUTES before the scheduled release of South Africa’s white-ball squads for their series against West Indies on Monday, the sky spat fire and lashed down rain as a thunderstorm growled grimly over the Wanderers. Then a scheduled power blackout in the area coincided with the announcement.

And then there was this, from Rob Walter in his first press conference as South Africa’s new coach in the shorter formats when he was asked which English football club he supported: “The side that won 7-0 last night.”

If you take omens seriously those are difficult to ignore. Whether they are good or bad will be seen in the ODIs, in East London and Potchefstroom on March 16, 18 and 21, and the T20Is, in Centurion and Johannesburg on March 25, 26 and 28.

The football team Walter referred to are Liverpool, who handed Manchester United a hiding for the ages in a Premier League match at Anfield on Sunday. What might he say to a similarly successful South Africa cricket team?

“The reality is you’ve got to trust in a process,” Walter said. “It was just last season that a side like Liverpool were pushing for winning the ‘quad’, which never happened. But they were highly successful. They’ve been through a bit of a ropey start to their season, but showed what they were capable of last evening.”

Liverpool achieved half the quadruple in 2021/22. They won the FA Cup and the Carabao Cup, beating Chelsea on penalties in both finals, finished a point behind Manchester City in the Premier League, and went down 1-0 to Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Walter hoped some of that sustained success would rub off on his charges.

“I’m buoyed by the quality of cricketers I see around,” he said. “The SA20 bears testament to that — a lot of different cricketers playing good cricket. The best analogy I can use is that South Africa have always been a very good cricket side. We want to turn them into a great cricket team.

“The journey between good to great is short, but it’s the hardest part of the journey to make. And that’s where we’re stuck right now. That’s what we’ll be focusing on. But it’s not as if the cricketers are not quality players. They are. We’ve seen that time and time again.”

Walter saw it during South Africa’s three home ODIs against England in January and February. The English were favoured, but the home side won 2-1.

“Mindset is everything,” he said. “In the England series we demonstrated to ourselves what it might look like in practice. The rest of the time it’s theoretical. You’re talking about what it might look and feel like. There we had a real, physical taste of what it might look like in its execution. When we find ourselves under pressure, it’s about taking the most aggressive approach that we can with the skill set that we have. With that comes making errors. As long as we can put them into context and keep edging forward, I’m happy.”

Walter’s way to unstick his team and achieve greatness involves making Aiden Markram the T20I captain, dropping his predecessor, Temba Bavuma, from that squad, and leaving the dressing room door open for the return of Faf du Plessis.

“Aiden has shown himself to be a leader over a period of time, and his most recent success with the Sunrisers stands out,” Walter said. “It seemed like a logical progression into the leadership of the national side. He has been there before but I think he’s matured a lot as a player and a leader since then.”

Markram captained Eastern Cape Sunrisers to triumph in the inaugural SA20 last month. He also led South Africa to the 2014 under-19 World Cup title — the only global trophy they have yet won — but looked out of his depth when he was put in charge for a home ODI series against India in February 2018, which the visitors won 4-1. Markram’s 115 against West Indies in Centurion last week, his first Test century in 17 innings, would have helped convince Walter that he was back on track.

“As for Temba missing out, that’s purely a T20 performance-based decision,” Walter said. “My job now is to work with him to get him back into the side. That will be one of our focuses.”

Bavuma relinquished the T20I leadership last month — when he retained the ODI reins and was appointed Test captain — in the aftermath of South Africa crashing out of the running for the T20 World Cup semifinals by losing to minnows the Netherlands in Adelaide. Bavuma has a T20I strike rate of 116.08. Until he is striking at around 140 he can’t expect to be considered for a place in the team as a top order batter.

Du Plessis last played for South Africa in February 2021. He has retired from Test cricket but not from the other formats. Even so, he has not been contracted by CSA and discussions with him about his availability for South Africa’s teams amid his commitments to T20 franchises so far haven’t yielded concrete results.

“He is very interested to resume those conversations and see how best we can work together,” Enoch Nkwe, CSA’s director of cricket, said at the same presser. “From a CSA point of view we’re happy to engage to find the best way forward.” A stumbling block has been the lack of contracts tailored for Test or white-ball players, but that could change when the new contracts are announced in the coming days. “What we foresee in the next 12 months is that we might become even more specific into [contracts for] T20, ODIs and Tests,” Nkwe said.

Johannesburg-born Walter was South Africa’s strength and conditioning expert and later their fielding coach from 2009 to 2013. As Titans head coach he shared the franchise one-day title with the Cobras in 2013/14 and won it outright the next season. In 2015/16 the Titans won the first-class and T20 trophies under Walter — who moved to New Zealand to become Otago’s head coach from September 2016.

The Volts promptly shambled to last place in all three formats in Walter’s first season in charge. A summer later they finished second from bottom in the Plunket Shield and second-last in the white-ball competitions. He didn’t win any titles with Otago but built them into a more competitive side, and moved to Hamilton before the 2020/21 season to take over the Central Stags. Walter’s team reached the T20 preliminary final that season and the one-day final in 2021/22.

Thus he has returned from New Zealand with no trophies. But, he said, the lessons of that experience were worth their weight in silverware: “We’d need a lot longer than this press conference to talk about what I’ve learnt in New Zealand. Personally, it was a journey of discovery around coaching. The short summary is I left a very successful Titans side to go to a side that came last in every format for two years. If you want to learn about your real values around coaching, you just need to lose a lot, which I did.” He said he had found in himself “a genuine love for art and the job of coaching, which ultimately is to help people reach and maximise their potential”.

Many South Africans leave their ailing, flailing, failing country in search of more functional, less depressing places to live and work. Not many return. What made Walter come back?

“When you get an opportunity to coach your country of birth and a place whose cricket structures you’ve been part of pretty much your whole life in some way, it’s a no-brainer. To coach internationally is every coach’s dream when they set out. I’m no different. When I left for New Zealand it was to grow myself as a coach and develop my skills; grow as a person, which certainly has happened over the seven-year period.”

It was a double-edged moment. The power was out, and would be for the next two hours. That would tangle the traffic on Johannesburg’s crumbling, crowded roads even more than usual. Later on Monday, the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was due to announce a cabinet reshuffle to help resolve the power crisis, among many others afflicting South Africa. Few held out hope that that would work.

But, as Walter spoke, the rain hammered onto the roof. When that happens at a time of import, isiXhosa speakers say icamagu livumile: the spirits have agreed. It’s less an omen, more a prayer. The cricket spirits, too, Walter would pray.

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Big names? Big deal. How not to win cricket’s most glittering prize

The IPL is not a telephone directory. It takes more than names and numbers to win it.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, Kane Williamson, Shreyas Iyer, Mayank Agarwal and Rishabh Pant walk into a bar, where they see Stephen Fleming, Mahela Jayawardene, Tom Moody, Brendon McCullum, Anil Kumble and Ricky Ponting.

Fancy meeting you here, one says to another. What’s up? That some of the biggest names in cricket have been lumped together in a bar tells us they are not in Ahmedabad, which is in the dry state of Gujarat. It’s just before 8pm (IST) on Sunday. This coming Sunday …

The televisions in the noisy, crowded room are, of course, turned on — the IPL final is about to start. And none of those big names are involved, because they are the captains and coaches of the six teams who were shut out of the tournament’s play-off stages. Played 14, didn’t win enough of them, thanks for coming.

Thereby hangs a puzzle, because the six sides — Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians, Sunrisers Hyderabad, Kolkata Knight Riders Punjab Kings and Delhi Capitals, and the previous iterations of some of them — have won a dozen of the 14 completed editions of cricket’s most glittering prize between them, and only Punjab and Delhi are without a title. Only in the first two IPLs, which were won by Rajasthan Royals and Deccan Chargers, were one of those half-dozen outfits not triumphant. Only in 2009, when Royal Challengers Bangalore went down to Deccan Chargers in the final, have one of them not reached the decider.

How, given all that, could it be that not one of those teams — particularly CSK and Mumbai, who have earned nine championships combined, or almost two-thirds of all the IPL silverware on offer — have made it to the business end this year? The other side of that question is how four sides who have just one title to show for their efforts — Rajasthan’s win in the inaugural 2008 competition — are the only ones left in the race this year?

It only adds to the intrigue that two of the final four, Gujarat Titans and Lucknow Super Giants, are new franchises in their first campaigns and haven’t had the chance to win anything. The captains and coaches still in the running, when compared to the stature of those who have fallen by the wayside in 2022, is part of this riddle: Gujarat’s Hardik Pandya and Ashish Nehra, Rajasthan’s Sanju Samson and Kumar Sangakkara, LSG’s KL Rahul and Andy Flower, and RCB’s Faf du Plessis and Sanjay Bangar, who has Mike Hesson at his elbow as director of cricket. There are giants of the game among them, certainly, but none taller than several of the 12 gathered for a mythical last IPL supper in a bar far from Ahmedabad.

Add some of the names attached in various capacities to the teams who haven’t made it, and the mystery deepens still. We’re talking about figures of the stature of Sachin Tendulkar, Zaheer Khan, Shane Bond, Michael Hussey, Eric Simons, Shane Watson, Ajit Agarkar, Pravin Amre, Simon Katich, Muttiah Muralitharan, Dale Steyn, Brian Lara and Jonty Rhodes. On the other side of that equation, Lasith Malinga, Paddy Upton, Gautam Gambhir and Gary Kirsten are in the dugouts of the sides who are still in the fray.

Might money buy success? None of the 10 franchises reached their salary cap of Rs90 crore (USD11.9-million) at the player auction in March. Mumbai and SRH came closest at Rs89.9 crore. But Mumbai were the first team to be eliminated, finishing bottom of the standings with four wins and 10 losses. SRH, who lost eight games, ended eighth. Before we think that decides the dollar debate, consider that the four teams who are still standing spent between Rs89.85 and Rs88.55 at the auction. Another four shelled out between Rs87.05 and Rs81.55. So, among the six teams who failed to make the play-offs were the four with the smallest salary bills.

Something similar is true of football’s English Premier League, in which Manchester City emerged victorious over Liverpool by a single point in the final standings, which were settled on Sunday. In March, no club had spent more on players than the £355-million committed to that cause by Man City. Liverpool doled out £41-million less than the champions, and between £29-million and £9-million less than Chelsea and Manchester United — who finished third and sixth. But the top six teams in the standings were also the top six spenders on players.

None of the five most expensive players at the IPL auction were bought by franchises that remain in the hunt. Of the 10 most handsomely paid, only RCB’s Harshal Patel — who sold for Rs10.75 crore — Lockie Ferguson and Avesh Khan — who were bought for Rs10 crore each by Gujarat and LSG — are still in action.

An important part of the explanation for what may seem inexplicable is that players change teams. For instance, Gujarat captain Pandya was part of Mumbai’s champion sides in 2015, 2019 and 2020. Du Plessis, RCB’s skipper, was involved in CSK’s success in 2018 and 2021 — when he scored a 59-ball 86 in the final against KKR.

Also, quality will out. Accordingly, the four finalists provided at least five and as many as eight of the leading 10 performances in terms of top run-scorers and wicket-takers, highest individual scores, best bowling in an innings, best economy rate in an innings and best economy rate in the tournament.

Among them were some of the IPL’s most enduring memories. Quinton de Kock’s screaming 70-ball 140 not out — the highest score this year — for LSG against KKR on Wednesday was a thing of wonder. Rajasthan’s Jos Buttler hammered half of the six centuries made in 2022, and across just six innings. Consistently bristling wrist spin earned Rajasthan’s Yuzvendra Chahal 26 wickets and made him the IPL’s most dangerous bowler. Happily, those stars have not shined for the last time this year.

But the IPL is not a telephone directory: it takes more than names and numbers to win it. It needs, among many other factors, belief, nerve, luck and bonding between players who, after the final, might not see each other — except as opponents — until next year. It’s difficult to know when you’ve nailed down that last element, but sometimes it can be read between the lines.

It’s there in comments attributed to Sal Kishore on Gujarat’s website: “It’s been amazing being here, with Ashu pa [Nehra] and Hardik. Ashu pa has made sure that everybody feels so secure in this team. Even when I was playing the 12th game of the season, I still felt like I need to contribute something for the team; not like I’ve been left out or something like that. We’ve all felt so secure and a lot of credit needs to be given to the both of them making the environment like that.”

And in what Rahul had to say about LSG teammate Mohsin Khan: “He’s been brilliant. I played with him in the nets first time a month ago, and I didn’t want to face him. Seriously — he was sharp. He’s scary at times in the nets. It’s not just the pace, he has a good brain, and skill as well.”

Even Virat Kohli isn’t immune. The former India captain is fading into the twilight of a great career, but his sentiments on Sunday, after RCB secured fourth place by dint of Mumbai beating Delhi Capitals, spoke of someone who is raging hard against the dying of the light: “It has been wonderful that I have got so much support in this edition. I am forever grateful to all the love that I have never seen before.”

More evidence of strong unity was to be seen in a video posted on Rajasthan’s social media feeds of their players keeping, for the most part, their composure and their humour intact on a jarring, strangely foggy, storm-struck flight from Mumbai to Kolkata for their qualifier against Gujarat on Tuesday.

There was visible relief on the Royals’ faces when the aircraft landed safely. How many of them might have headed straight for the nearest bar to calm their nerves? And who would they have found there?

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Never alone: the corona culture of sport and fandom

If a wicket falls in an empty stadium and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? The virus vexed future of playing and watching sport.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

“WHEN you walk through a storm.” Even the most casual football person knows what’s coming. “Hold your head up high.” If, somehow, they don’t know, the internet will tell them. “And don’t be afraid of the dark.”

There aren’t quite enough recorded versions … “At the end of a storm …” to assign one to each of the 54 074 seats at Anfield. “ … There’s a golden sky …” But many have been made since 1945 … “And the sweet silver song of a lark …” when it featured in Carousel, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

“Walk on through the wind …” These lines have been ringing out wherever Scousers, actual and aspirant, have gathered since Gerry and the Pacemakers went to No. 1 in the UK charts in 1963. “Walk on through the rain …” At this point even non-Liverpool supporters pause to pay their respects, because this isn’t any anthem.

“Though your dreams be tossed and blown …” It’s the sound of loyalty and belonging … “Walk on, walk on …” and of knowing you are among comrades … “With hope in your heart …” This, surely, is the sound of love.

“And you’ll never walk alone … You’ll never walk alone.”

But, late on the night of July 22, Liverpool’s players and staff were indeed alone. With each other. They had gathered on a specially constructed podium in the stands of their famous stadium’s even more famous Kop end, which was draped in banners and flags.

The dazzling football both teams had played that evening, unhinged in the best way from having to take things seriously, in Liverpool’s 5-3 win over Chelsea was irrelevant. Nothing had mattered in the English Premier League since June 25, when Chelsea beat Manchester City to ensure Liverpool would win the title for the first time in 30 years.

As Jordan Henderson, Liverpool’s captain, thrust the trophy into the night sky, his players boomed their triumph behind him and lights, fireworks, music and glittery confetti filled millions of screens around the world. But there was a hollowness at the heart of the scene that could only have been filled by occupants of those 54 074 empty, silent seats. The only witnesses, bar the functionaries, were Anfield’s ghosts of successes and failures past.

You’ll Never Walk Alone had, of course, swooned around the void before kick-off. Lacking human embrace, the music bounced back the unhearing hardness, cold in its rejection. But the first touch of the ball was accompanied, on television, by a warm cheer for the champions.

Fact’s petticoat slipped from under fiction’s ballgown at the start of the second half, when the canned noise kicked in a heartbeat too late to spare viewers the rippling echoes of the players’ shouting and clapping their encouragement to each other. For a moment, sad reality was all there was to hear.

It’s the job of Adam Peri, a Sky Sports sound supervisor, to spare us that terrifying sound. National Public Radio sought him out and found him twiddling knobs for West Ham’s match against Watford in a studio kilometres from London Stadium. “Making sure the West Ham chants are nice and loud,” Peri said. A West Ham player went down. “I’m just going to trickle in a bit of whistles; giving it a bit of a boo …”

He sees his role as “trying to anticipate what a player might do next, and in a way I guess I’m reading their mind. When you really get into the zone you’re living and breathing the game, feeling confident enough to use any sound that is available to help tell the story.”

The sounds Peri edits into viewers’ consciousness have been recorded at earlier matches by Electronic Arts, or EA Sports (EA), the makers of the FIFA video game. EA sound designer Paul Boechler revealed some of the geekery at play: “There’s things like the ‘oooh’ reaction for a save, and the ‘ooooooh’ reaction to a miss.”

In football matches broadcast from Spain, a mosaic overlay was applied to camera shots that included the stands to break up views of endless rows of unfilled seats. Another difference will confirm the suspicions of those from sunnier climes that England’s unrelenting winter greyness seeps into hearts and minds. “The Premier League is doing negative reactions, but La Liga is actually not,” Boechler said. “La Liga is going with a much more positive reaction focus overall.”

La Liga head of communications Joris Evers confirmed as much, and added: “But it’s not the same. We want to try and get real fans back in the stands as soon as possible.”

And so says all of sport. If a wicket falls in an empty cricket ground and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? England and West Indies restarted cricket with three Tests played in Southampton and Manchester. Not a lot besides the low burble of a crowd, artificially added by Sky, could by heard.

Without spectators the sound of major sport is of one hand clapping. That may be no bad thing. Instead of Sky’s audio smoke and mirrors, we could hear managers chewing gum between barks at their players. In Germany, Bundesliga viewers had the option of tuning out the canned atmosphere so they could do exactly that.

But it’s complicated, as the television audience discovered during a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros in Houston played on the same day Liverpool raised the trophy. When Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly lingered at first base after a confrontational play, Astros manager Dusty Baker, out of sight but not out of range of the microphones, was heard yelling, “Just get on the mound, motherfucker.”

Baseball has had an interesting relationship with empty stadiums. Alternative plans have had to be made for the millions of peanuts grown and roasted to be sold at games in the US, what with each team’s regular season schedule hacked from 162 to only 60 games. In Taiwan, cheerleaders smiled and danced at desolate stands. Down the road in South Korea, teams were in trouble after dressing up sex dolls and putting them in the stands. Bookmakers in the US have adjusted their odds to account for the assumption that, without spectators, home advantage isn’t nearly as influential.

Something similar happened in the Bundesliga, where teams achieved demonstrably better results than previously when they played away. And diving disappeared. What’s the point of trying to fool the referee by rolling like a freshly felled log for metres on end if thousands of one-eyed home fans aren’t howling in sympathy?

Will the seeming silence of the scrum, beyond the hit and heave, be shattered by the sounds of one pack of forwards trying to monster the other? Some of those noises come from strange places and are better unheard. It seems SuperSport, the primary broadcasters of the game in South Africa, will spare us the gorier details once rugby resumes. A spokesperson said the network was “still tweaking the tech, but as a matter of principle, we will incorporate virtual sounds, crowds and fan interaction”.

Even so, as long as stadiums stay empty except for players, officials and camera operators, a human-shaped vacuum will gape at the heart of sport. Professor Heather Reid is the philosophy chair at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. She sits on the boards of publications like the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. Less extraordinarily, she’s also a fan, as she explained to the BBC: “I was in the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing the night that Usain Bolt broke the world record in the 100 metres [at the 2008 Olympics], and there’s this feeling that goes over the crowd that makes everyone feel like hugging each other. We transcend our partisan rooting for particular countries and a particular athlete, and we all start cheering just for what a human being is able to do.”

Unfortunately for all who know and cherish that feeling, another professor, bioethicist Andy Miah, the science communication and future media chair at the University of Salford in Manchester, is here to burst that bubble. “The big transition that people are coming to terms with is the idea that we are able to live within virtual worlds,” he said. “It’s really remarkable what’s happened over the last few months.”

Miah listed the Mutua Madrid Virtual Open Pro tennis tournament, which featured Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal squaring off not across a net but in front of a computer, holding controllers instead of racquets, as an example. And the Australia Virtual F1 Grand Prix, which replaced the cancelled real-world version: suddenly gamers were competing with drivers.

“Reality is going through a major upheaval,” Miah said. “Sport has always been a kind of unreality. We’re beginning to see a complete change of the relationship between the spectator and the player. People want to be part of the production of the sport, not just be spectators of it.”

Already, Formula E drivers’ electric cars go faster when they use a “fanboost” — a surge of bonus power available to the five drivers who win the most supporters’ votes. “We can imagine a future where you have crowds making decisions in the field of play in a much more direct way,” Miah said.

The fans, it seems, are no longer content to watch alone.

First published by New Frame.

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Oh to be in England now that football is here

Having been in a pub in Manchester trying not to laugh while Man United were getting their backsides kicked, I didn’t want to be around to see Mancunians’ inhumanity to Mancunians.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in London

THERE’S a pub down the road here in London called the Dundee Arms, a proper East End boozer and a fine place to watch football. Even if you don’t really like football.

Get there less than 20 minutes before kick-off and you won’t get a seat. But there are three screens, plenty of standing room on the worn wooden floor, and not too many pillars and poles to spoil the view.

The beer tastes like something, and it damn well should: a pint costs the equivalent of R104.52 in Thursday’s money. Food? Toasted cheese, take it or leave it.

One of the bartenders is a beanpole of a bloke in a Mohican and earrings and clothes from the 1980s. Another, a skinhead, divides his time between the pub and working as a receptionist at a nearby yoga studio.

On the wall above the bar is a painting of a man, fists raised, who may or may not have been Daniel Mendoza — a bareknuckle boxer who lived a short walk away on Paradise Row in the 1700s. He invented the jab and the sideways step, and was reputed to be the first jew to talk to King George III.

Those were the days, apparently. But there I was on another day — April 9 this year — to see Man City beat Spurs 1-0 in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final, and five days later to see Liverpool beat Chelsea 2-0 in the Premier League, and three days after that to see City win the second leg of the quarter-final 4-3 but for Spurs to advance on the away goals rule.

If you’re a football fan you’ll know that I’ve missed a fair few games at the Dundee Arms in the past few weeks. You should also know that here in the trenches of the press there are only so many pints you can afford at R104.52 a pop. Besides, it’s not safe.

On April 9 I thought I might die there with “Mo Salah! Mo Salah! Flying down the wing!” thundering through my head. Eight days later I again thought I might die, this time when Fernando Llorente’s hip was ruled to have more to do with

with the ball ending up in City’s net than his arm. Minutes after that, the end felt near again, and with Raheem Sterling’s look of shock and disgust at having his late strike ruled out for offside by VAR as my last memory.

The Dundee Arms is in a building of a certain age and condition, and it seemed it could easily have come crashing down in the mad moments after Mohamed Salah calligraphed a goal of arresting beauty to put Chelsea out of their misery.

Who knew there were so many Liverpool supporters in the East End of London? Who knew they could jump so high, repeatedly, in celebration? Who knows how many of them were actually Chelsea haters?

An exponentially bigger explosion of ecstasy accompanied Sterling being denied the glory of putting City in the semis because a pitchside gizmo said Sergio Agüro was offside. And he was. Even Pep said so: “The offside is offside.”

The English are weird. Invite them to a wedding and they stand around not looking at each other, even though they all know each other, until the DJ plays an awful song that they all know worryingly well and can sing at each other in some kind of celebration of their mutual recognition of awfulness. Ask them to vote on whether they want to remain part of the most successful peacemaking project in human history — albeit that the European Union has been hijacked by neoliberalism — and they get it badly wrong and spend years squabbling about whether or not they have got it wrong.

But put them in a pub where there’s footy on the telly, beer in the taps and cheese toasties on offer and they are suddenly as happily human as the rest of us. Which was why I didn’t go to the Dundee Arms on Wednesday to watch the Manchester Derby.

That’s too much humanity in one small, heaving place for me, and who knows where that humanity has been? Indeed, whether we can call what slithers to London from oop frozen bloody north human enough to be put into the same biological bracket as even Nigel Farage, the right-wing Brexit nutter wonderfully described in the Observer the other week as a “nicotine-stained man-frog”, is not at all certain. Whatever. Having experienced the surreality, in 2017, of being in a pub in Manchester trying not to laugh while United were getting their backsides kicked, I didn’t want to be around to see Mancunians’ inhumanity to Mancunians.

Daniel Taylor of the Guardian was not so lucky. He actually had to go rat-infested Old Trafford, where rain tips down onto spectators through the roof of the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand, to report on the match.

“Every season there is always one game in the title race when the team who are going to win the Premier League now it is going to be their year,” Taylor wrote. “One game when everything turns in their favour, all the hard work comes together and the supporters can think it is going to be a season to cherish.

“For Manchester City, was this that night? It certainly felt that way even if they still have to negotiate a tricky assignment at Burnley on Sunday before closing their season with a home game against Leicester and a trip to Brighton. City have made it 11 league wins in a row and if they can extend that sequence to 14 there will be nothing Liverpool, in second place, can do about it. No wonder there was such jubilation at the final whistle from the players in blue.”

In the same paper, Barney Ronay, who writes brilliantly about football and everything else because he writes about everything else except the football, had it thus: “Not even close. Not even close to being close. If there is an accurate measure of Manchester City’s domestic dominance over the past two seasons, and more specifically that combined 50-point lead over the creaky 1990s tribute act from across the way, it is perhaps the sight of Old Trafford at the final whistle of this room-temperature 2-0 derby victory.

“As the home crowd filed out in added time you could see the bones of this ground open up, its clanky iron clavicles exposed to the air. The only noise came from the sky blue corner where City’s fans sang ‘this city is ours’ and — a little prematurely: the bigger test of Burnley away is yet to come — a few late rounds of ‘Campeones’.”

What was it like down the Dundee Arms? I don’t want to know.