Manchester City - Manchester United was beautiful chaos

Look, we’re going to have to face it. Sometimes, a game of football just doesn’t make sense. Sometimes — as with the Manchester derby — the cliche of two halves doesn’t quite cut it. This was a game of at least six teams. Dominant City against Shuddering United, then Ruthless United against Where The Hell Have City Gone?, and following that a brief flurry of Angry City against Hanging-On United.

Brilliant players looked brilliant. Brilliant players looked rubbish. Sometimes those players were the same players. Paul Pogba was a waste of money with a haircut, until all of a sudden he scored twice, and Alexis Sanchez the same — with less of a haircut — until he made three. Raheem Sterling moved like a genius and finished like a clown. Meanwhile Chris Smalling and Vincent Kompany found time to act out their own little epic of humiliation and revenge.

The second-best defence in the league conceded two in the first half; it could have been five. Then the best conceded three in 12 second-half minutes. And there were two decent penalty shouts and a late flurry of bookings and at least two shots against the post and David de Gea did the usual and Ander Herrera did his usual and Fernandinho was decent and snide and some people cried and, well, all in all it was just a massive pile of good, fun, chewy, footballing stuff.

When looking for some sense in all this nonsense, some catalyst at the heart of the chaos, we should perhaps consider the peculiar significance of the game. The match was, after all, simultaneously near-irrelevant and utterly vital. At the most granular level, it was a Manchester derby, and one that might end in a title presentation. A United loss would be unconscionable; a City win delicious. Yet City rested players with one eye on the Champions League and the other on the 16-point gap, while United, thanks to their win over Liverpool, went in with the advantage in the race for second.

The worth of the game, then, was largely symbolic: Pride, both civic and personal, along with those nebulous but ever-important bragging rites. Yet by the end, both teams were fully committed. City may have begun the game without a striker, but they ended it with two, as well as Kevin Du Bruyne. Meanwhile United were apparently so incensed and enraged by City’s easy, vocal superiority that Ashley Young, at half-time, turned into Cicero.

In part, it’s encouraging that Premier League footballers, so often assumed to be isolated from their clubs’ identities by virtue of their wealth and peripatetic careers, can really get into a derby. Why, it’s almost like it’s possible to have a haircut and care about playing football well. But this was also an object lesson in how enjoyable it is when football matches take on a shape and a sense of story.

After all, if City don’t score twice in the first half, then United don’t traipse in at half-time with oles ringing in their ears. Ashley Young doesn’t get up on his soapbox, and Chris Smalling doesn’t come over all Tarantino. That leads to United’s one-two-three sucker punches, and those goals, along with a justified sense of injustice relating to Ashley Young’s studs, inform City’s frantic, foul-spotted attempts to wrench the game back. A title party in the abstract is one thing. A title party seized, then fumbled, is quite another.

Each twist occasioned the next; each magnified and intensified the response. There were so many ways in which this game could have petered out into something flat, but instead we got a delirious mess that left one side utterly delighted, and the other agitated and distressed. Whether those sides were the correct sides is a matter of taste, of course. But structurally speaking, this was the right ending.

Will it mean anything else, beyond an explosion of rancorous party-pooping? Presumably City would rather have been going into the second leg against Liverpool with the title, and its accompanying buzz, safely tucked away. And perhaps this will stand as more evidence that when City wobble, they wobble hard. United’s three in 12 minutes join Liverpool’s three in nine minutes, back in January, and three in 19 last Wednesday. Games between City and a decent opponent, it appears, are never truly dead, and while Liverpool aren’t allowed to enjoy United victories, you suspect they won’t have minded this one.

(City don’t always fall apart, of course; this is the team with the best defensive record in the league. As such, this isn’t really a weakness. It’s more of a strange affectation, like a monocle. But like a monocle, it can make them look very silly.)

As for United, they will be hoping that this amounts to some kind of catalyst, as well as some kind of statement. They should have collapsed; instead they turned it around. Pogba and Sanchez could have vanished; instead they won the game. And taken as a whole, the second half was exactly the kind of performance Mourinho sides are supposed to produce: they came out with their game faces on, they made and took their chances, and then they held on through a heady blend of luck, hard work, and weaponised snidery.

After the game, Mourinho once again rolled out his persistent refrain from the second half of the season: we are better than we are given credit for, the players are better than they are given credit for, I am better than I am given credit for. For once, both performance and result suggested that he had a point. It could, of course, just go down as an excellent performance in a strange game. But it could also be the first step on a road that ends in humanity’s smuggest, most heartfelt “I told you so”. At the very least, it promises more of a title race next season. Won’t that be nice.