Manchester City is in second place. Ah, so *this* is what a title race looks like

Hello and welcome to Tactically Naive, your friendly neighbourhood look back at the week in soccer. This week’s column has mostly been moving house.

Because on Saturday evening Manchester City lost a game of football in the Premier League for the first time since that weird and largely irrelevant derby last season. Meanwhile Liverpool, having hammered Bournemouth earlier in the day, now sit clear at the top of the league by a single point. Things are happening.

Title races are strange and nebulous things. Why does it seem we have more of one today, after this particular pair of games, than we did before? One point ahead against two points behind: there isn’t that much of a difference. A swing of a single game before, the same afterwards. Yet somehow it is more on than it was before. Perhaps, in this shift, we can identify the key elements of any title race: time plus distribution, multiplied by mortality.

Time

To start with the blindingly obvious, every game takes us closer to the end of the race. In this particular two-horse race, Liverpool skipped over the latest fence with a wink and flourish, while City planted straight into it, losing their stride. And a trip over one fence makes the next fence that little bit larger.

Also, December is coming. That means Christmas. And that means the Premier League gets to indulge in its strange, destructive, and almost certainly stupid tradition of making its teams play a million games across the festive period. We are approaching a gauntlet: the moment when we find out which squads are deep enough and lucky enough to keep picking up points even when they’re absolutely knackered.

It’s good television, right? That’s the justification. Anyway, the one thing nobody can afford to do, as they head into this carnage, is drop points.

Distribution

I may not make much practical difference, but Liverpool being ahead of City, even if only by a tiny margin, feels much more interesting than City being ahead of Liverpool. Perhaps that’s partly a consequence of just how pathetically distant everybody else was last season as City sailed off into the distance. And perhaps, generally speaking, it’s better to see champions asked to restate their claim rather than simply defend it.

But also it’s because there has been, for much of this season, a sense of inevitability about City. A kind of sense that however well Liverpool did, City — record-breaking City, best-ever City, Pepped-to-the-Max City — would be just a little bit better. And that might still be the case over 38 games. But over 16, they’ve been just that tiny bit worse, and that’s what makes this a race.

Which brings us nicely to …

Mortality

Presumably, Arsenal fans were the ones most worried about this, but it had to have occurred to everybody that City might just stroll through this season unbeaten. They nearly managed it last year, after all, with only two weird blowouts to blot their record. This season, they’d already been away to Anfield, to Wembley, and to the Emirates, emerging with seven points. Just Chelsea to go, then …

Ah.

There was an encouraging non-freakishness about this 2-0 loss, as well. City were good, of course, and had most of the ball and the chances, but this defeat didn’t hinge on anything truly bizarre or ridiculous, like Alexis Sanchez playing well. Just a touch of wastefulness, a hint of sloppy defending, a smidge of bad luck … you know, all the things that happen to ordinary football teams.

So now that City are vincibles, what about unbeaten Liverpool? They certainly feel significantly more beatable, if only because they’re the upstarts and they don’t have a 100-point season tucked under their belt. And perhaps this is the best way for things to be balanced, from a dramatic point of view: the chasers just nudging into the lead, a nose ahead of expectations, right as the champions flash their first glimpse of vulnerability.

Now, as long as Liverpool don’t fall to pieces, we might actually get a bit of excitement come springtime. Wait, no. They’re leading. As long as City don’t fall to pieces … no, that doesn’t look right. Huh.

For many, many reasons. Today’s reason is their response to Raheem Sterling, who was racially abused during City’s game against Chelsea and subsequently suggested — entirely correctly — that parts of the UK media landscape contribute to the atmosphere that makes such abuse possible.

Or, in translation: Yep, we’re bang to rights here. We were hoping you wouldn’t notice. Still, we have no intention of doing anything about it, and we will not be stopping.

By way of correctives, it’s worth reading Musa Okwonga over in the Guardian, who correctly points out that the problem with the British media goes well beyond the Sun and their comrades-in-harm at the Daily Mail. You might also want to look at Caricom, a magazine that seeks to examine football and fan culture “through the underexplored lens of the black experience in Great Britain and beyond.” But of course, whatever else you do … don’t buy what the Sun are selling.