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This should be one of Sunderland’s greatest away days in a generation, but a nagging doubt will accompany the Black Cats on their trip to Portugal on Wednesday.

Sunderland fly into Lisbon for their first European game on foreign soil in 50 years in an unusual position.

They have genuine ambitions of going deep in the Europa League, but there are already signs of second-season syndrome about a domestic campaign that has begun with one win in six games.

The defeat by Brighton was the first of a run of nine games in 29 days, the sort of fixture list the club have never had to contend with before.

If qualifying for the Europa League was a historic achievement, what followed was never going to be straightforward.

Bounce back required

Performances and results, including a magical night on Wearside against AZ Alkmaar, have been “about what we expected, to be honest”, according to one insider.

Whatever the flaws of the Brighton defeat, it promises to be some week for Sunderland supporters.

They snapped up all 4,000 tickets allocated to them, with many thousands more making the journey to Leiria, a city in central Portugal roughly two hours from both Porto and Lisbon.

In some ways, it is a slightly underwhelming first destination for Sunderland, who face a second-tier Portuguese side with an average attendance of fewer than 1,500.

Torreense pulled off one of the biggest shocks in European football history by winning the Portuguese Cup last season, but the club’s modest stature means their home Europa League matches have had to be moved from the tiny Estadio Manuel Marques.

Sunderland had hoped the game would be played in the Algarve, prompting a huge exodus of Black Cats supporters, but Uefa confounded expectations by selecting Leiria as the venue.

The decision has added cost and inconvenience for many fans.

With away trips to Poznan, Brussels and Milan before December, some are prioritising other destinations.

Even Sunderland have opted against training in Leiria before the game, securing Uefa dispensation to conduct their pre-match media duties in Lisbon shortly after arriving on Wednesday evening.

Mitigating factors

Still, this is a chance for Regis Le Bris and the Black Cats to lay down a marker and calm some of the jitters among their supporters.

That edginess is not shared in the boardroom.

Owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus has been ruthless with managers in the past, pulling the trigger on Tony Mowbray just months after he led Sunderland to the Championship play-offs with some wonderful attacking football.

But there is no prospect of an overreaction to a fairly ordinary start to the season.

“No panic” is the message coming from the Sunderland boardroom, and there are several reasons for that. For starters, their fixture list has been treacherous. They have faced all four of the Premier League’s current top four and deserved more than the one point they have collected from a possible 12.

There were fine margins against Arsenal and Brentford, while Sunderland more than matched Manchester City for long periods at the Etihad Stadium. The data metrics the club use to track their progress suggest, according to insiders, that the team are actually improving on last season.

There is a certain irony in Sunderland turning to the expected goals (xG) table, which consistently suggested they were overperforming last season, but it puts their early struggles into context.

Faith in Le Bris

There is also still huge support for Le Bris, whose excellent work on Wearside has been recognised nationally.

“Regis Le Bris has more credit in the bank than any manager in the Premier League barring maybe Mikel Arteta,” a Sunderland insider tells The i Paper. “He is absolutely backed and supported.”

There is a school of thought within the club that Sunderland are better as underdogs, but they want to “think and act” like a top flight club capable of challenging for honours in the not-too-distant future.

Squaring that circle is part of the challenge this season.

Several key off-field appointments have been confirmed, the latest being Australian Luke Matthews joining as commercial director.

They come alongside a more prominent role for Louis-Dreyfus following the abrupt departure of Tom Burwell, the club’s acting chief executive.

Departments were told it was “business as usual” after Burwell’s exit and, to be fair, the owner has always been a hands-on figure.

Burwell’s sudden departure came as a surprise, but the failure to secure a multi-million-pound front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with Visit Ghana was a blow for a club that needs to maximise commercial revenue in a season when new squad cost ratio limits will apply.

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The i Paper understands another company is in advanced negotiations to replace Visit Ghana at a similar valuation, with hopes that the deal can be signed off imminently.

What Sunderland need in the short term is success on the pitch, with Torreense followed by a Premier League trip to fellow slow starters Bournemouth on Sunday. It feels like a big week.

“Nobody said it was going to be easy, but the club wanted this,” a source says. “We’re making history and we should embrace that.” 

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KING POWER – These kinds of mismatches in the women’s game used to be filed under “scenes nobody likes to see”.

Effervescent England blew away a Greek side dreaming of their first major tournament with five goals and 8-1 on aggregate. With one qualifying play-off to go, the Lionesses finally look like potential 2027 World Cup champions.

If the away leg was tepid, this was a tempest, inspired by Alessia Russo, Lauren James and Georgia Stanway. Russo seized upon James’ through ball inside three minutes before the Chelsea forward capitalised on Maya Le Tissier’s brilliant run to double the lead.

A word too for Lauren Hemp, who carved Greece open down the left for the third and fourth, teeing up a Stanway header and then an unmarked, in-sliding James. Russo’s second finish came late, but England might have had seven or eight by then.

Early in her reign, Sarina Wiegman used to complain of these see-saw qualifiers; the more her team ran up the score, the less she could learn. There was at least a chance to experiment, with Lexi Potter and Freya Godfrey handed their debuts.

But with so many of the League A runners-up brushing aside minnows last night, the question has to be asked why Uefa have rejigged World Cup qualifying to make it so brutally unfair on teams like Greece. Why could the runners-up from the top-seeded groups (England among them) not just qualify automatically? Instead, some of the world’s biggest teams are playing ties which have felt like absurd formalities.

For Wiegman, there was an opportunity to solve an age-old puzzle of how to reinvigorate the midfield of Stanway and Keira Walsh. Both were unleashed by the deep-lying debutant Potter, who was unlucky to see her goal chalked off for a foul.

The Walsh-Potter pivot, so successful at Chelsea this season, was replicated to great effect, allowing Stanway license to roam. After a couple of shaky moments, Potter completed 97 per cent of her passes. The 20-year-old makes Walsh an even better player, is proving herself ahead of Wieke Kaptein at club level and has now thrown herself into the mix for next summer.

The only loser from that is likely to be Ella Toone, an unused substitute once again after her axe from the initial squad. With James in electric form and Laura Blindkilde Brown competing for that third spot, it is going to get harder and harder for her to force her way back in.

England are at last playing with a freedom they have not always shown since winning their second Euros. That is despite the addition of these qualifiers, which have been an additional burden in a congested calendar – whatever revenues can be milked from them.

Yet the real paradox is that finishing behind Spain in qualifying has entailed no real punishment. England have benefited from these run-outs so much more than Greece, one of the nations these games are supposed to help develop. Meanwhile, a formidable Belgium team have crashed out altogether and Wales and Scotland are going through a convoluted process after topping their groups.

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When I asked Wiegman if she thought the new system had worked, she was guarded and careful not to criticise Uefa. “Of course we wanted to qualify straight away, that’s not the case. And for us now, the facts are that we are in the play-offs, we have played Greece, now we’re through, now we’re going to play Ukraine and that’s what my focus is on,” she said.

“Of course, Uefa will refuel things and how things are set up and see whether they think it works or it should be better or different. I don’t think it’s my place now to refuel that, I’m here for England to win these games and qualify for the World Cup.”

Plenty of other countries will have grumbles – and the World Cup risks being a poorer tournament for it.

And as WSL attendances fall and England games do not sell out, fans need to see competitive dust-ups. Ukraine will hope they can provide one in the final hurdle in the Lionesses’ way before Brazil.  

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This season we’re doing football journalism differently. Join The i Paper Sport channel on WhatsApp here to vote for the club Daniel Storey should cover this week on The Journeyman

Luke Garrard is sitting on a cool box placed against the advertising hoardings. It is positioned slightly away from the dugout, giving the impression that he is on his own, like a small child perched on their suitcase on a train platform.

Garrard remains there, almost motionless, for what I would estimate to be 1.3 seconds. Then he is up, shouting at one of his players, gesticulating at the fourth official, using some industrial language and running over for a quick chat with assistant Junior Lewis, who is standing at the back of the bench several metres away. He scampers back down to the cool box for more gestures before almost getting into a tussle with the opposition manager.

It is, to be clear, pretty intense. I have sat behind lots of managers at lots of matches, somewhere in the hundreds. Garrard ranks in the top 10 for the most manic, although no official list exists. I forgot to mention that, during most of this, his team are winning 3-1 with eight minutes remaining against a Kidderminster Harriers side that had been reduced to 10 men long before.

There have been 145 clubs in the history of the Football League and Boreham Wood are favourites to become the 146th. When I visit, they are top of the National League, unbeaten and odds-on to win the division and secure automatic promotion. For a club that was in the National League South two years ago, competing in a division containing several former league clubs with bigger budgets, this dominance is unexpected.

Barring a five-month period in 2024, when I hope he sat completely still in a darkened room to restore his energy levels, Garrard has been doing this, gesture mania and all, for 11 years. Immediately before that, he spent five seasons as a Boreham Wood player. Add in a loan season and a short spell in 2005, and Garrard has been employed by the club for roughly 40 per cent of his life.

I must return to the intensity for a moment. If you expect Lewis to be the good cop to Garrard’s bad cop, or vice versa, think again. The assistant holds up a hand in acceptance when one player responds in frustration to the umpteenth screech in the previous five minutes. The manager briefly hops around on the spot and shouts. I work out that he wants an attacking player to move away from the goalkeeper at a corner because he is worried about the referee awarding a free-kick.

Shortly before half-time, Lewis screams, “F**king break their spirit”, at a volume that would not be out of place in a combat situation. A couple of supporters cheer the message. To an outsider, the basic on-pitch principle appears to be simple: hard to play in this team, harder to play against it.

If there is a Boreham Wood way, that essentially defines it. They are in your face and relentless in their pursuit of being better than you. They are capable of passing or ploughing through opponents. They are prepared for a ruckus or a recital, and they back themselves to beat most teams at this level by doing both.

The last half-decade in the National League has been defined by high-spending or high-profile clubs duking it out, including Wrexham, York City, Rochdale, Notts County, Barnet, Chesterfield and Stockport. This is different. Boreham Wood certainly do not have the biggest budget in the division, but they are comfortably its highest-performing club. Losing the play-off final on penalties at Wembley in May was merely a speed bump.

Boreham Wood would stress that first-team performance is simply the product of the wider ecosystem, so let us wind back. In 2002, the club founded the PASE Academy, which stands for Programme for Academic and Sporting Excellence. The scheme aimed to provide a dual programme for 16 to 19-year-olds, particularly those released by clubs higher up the pyramid. If Boreham Wood have one advantage in the National League, it is their wonderful catchment area just north of north London.

The approach became self-fulfilling because the provision was excellent and the results followed. Talent was either developed for the first team or moved out of football with an education that helped secure employment. The club progressed from the Southern League Eastern Division, where they were a big fish, to the National League within a decade.

It has been a big summer for the PASE Academy, with two transfers completed on deadline day: Iliman Ndiaye to Manchester City and Sorba Thomas to Hull City. Both players, whose transfer fees totalled more than £75m, were products of the system. Ndiaye joined at 16 after his father moved from Senegal. Thomas arrived after being released by West Ham at the same age.

If seeing players who graduated from the academy five and seven years ago secure big moves is proof of the process, a third summer transfer potentially changed Boreham Wood forever. With Ndiaye and Thomas, the club gained no significant financial benefit. In the case of Abdul Abdulmalik, it absolutely did.

Before this summer, Boreham Wood’s record sale was £34,000, paid by Crystal Palace in 2008 for forward Simon Thomas. At Wembley in May, I watched Abdulmalik run the game in a manner rarely seen in professional football. He had been released by Millwall in 2024 before being picked up by Boreham Wood at the age of 21. That is an important point: the club recruits released talent for the first team as well as the academy.

Abdulmalik’s National League form, coupled with his Wembley display, sparked a scramble involving clubs in the EFL and Sweden’s Allsvenskan. Djurgardens had four bids rejected, with Boreham Wood criticised for not cashing in. A deal was eventually completed for an initial fee of £1.5m, 50 per cent more than the previous non-league record and 44 times the club’s previous record sale.

That takes Boreham Wood to the next stage. The fee alone is more than half the club’s likely revenue for last year. It sends a clear message to other released players that Boreham Wood is a good place to develop and earn a second chance remarkably quickly if they impress. It also gave Garrard funds to invest in the squad, although no overhaul was necessary. Boreham Wood have loan players from Chelsea, Tottenham and Fulham, maximising the advantages of their location near London. It all makes sense.

The only lingering question is how to bring the local community along for the ride. The crowd for the win over Kidderminster included just over 1,000 home supporters. If the club are promoted, their attendance would be among the lowest in the EFL.

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It is not easy, with Watford and Barnet nearby and Arsenal and Tottenham drawing support from across the suburbs. Proximity to London may help with player recruitment, but it makes attracting supporters more difficult. As with Bromley before them, there is no shame in marketing yourself as the second team of Premier League fans.

Either way, we are about to find out just how far this can go. This is a project defined by self-fulfilment and fuelled by relentlessness, from the football and recruitment to the academy and the pursuit of a place in the Football League. Add managerial long-termism, investment and one of the richest catchment areas in Europe, and you have a recipe for overachievement.

Boreham Wood are on their way. 

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It was not Gary Neville’s fourth Sir Alex Ferguson mention within 26 minutes but his second Huel namedrop that prompted the existential crisis. What are we really doing here?

Cut to 42 minutes and 51 seconds of the Overlap Daily’s first episode and YouTuber Mark Goldbridge, compering for the omnipresent Neville and Jamie Carragher, appears to ask himself the same question when gazing into the middle distance.

This is not just all the football, all the time, as David Mitchell parodied in his increasingly appropriate sketch from 18 years ago. This is too much “Nev” and “Carra”, far too often.

If you want to hear from Neville alone recently then don’t worry, you have options. Since Thursday, he has been on a 75-minute Stick to Football podcast and two more Sky Sports podcasts (28 and 30 minutes in length respectively) on top of that 76-minute episode to launch Overlap Daily.

That is 209 minutes of Neville, excluding his punditry stints at Old Trafford and Anfield over the weekend, which all distractions aside requires seven 30-minute commutes to consume.

Who wants to listen to that much of anyone?

With variety therefore essential, Neville thinks he has the answer himself. He has tapped into Goldbridge’s Patridgean world and rebranded the social media personality’s “That’s Football” page on YouTube to Overlap Daily.

That brings a hefty 1.54m subscribers with it, proving Goldbridge is not only Neville’s greatest asset but someone who is willing to get milked as he has a sip himself.

“I keep reading you’re not going to be yourself, you’ve sold out,” is Carragher’s opening barb, given Goldbridge’s real name is Brent Di Cesare, but there is only one winner here. Goldbridge has gone from his bedroom to mingling with Premier League greats, with Neville relying on his impressive pull to reach a wider audience.

Soon, Overlap Daily will be flooded as (deep breath) Steven Gerrard, Joe Hart, Jamie Redknapp, Ashley Young, Tim Sherwood, Kelly Cates, Duncan Ferguson, Mark Crossley, Becky Ives and Peter Schmeichel all join the stable.

That means a regular stream of content, the instrumental social media soundbites that come with it, and the hope – in Neville’s eyes – that those craving hours of football analysis will stick to his Overlap brand.

Carra vs Goldbridge went off straight away!

Watch the Overlap Daily launch episode at 4pm on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts #overlapdaily #goldbridge #carragher pic.twitter.com/ZBR5QJhwOj

— Overlap Daily (@ThatsFootballTV) October 9, 2026

If less was ever more – one or two punchy podcasts per week – then we are past the point of finding out.

With the World Cup, Euros and Champions League all expanding it is little wonder football podcasts are doing the same. This remains a relatively new medium and the introduction of videos and polished studio setups has only accelerated its growth.

What is now a multi-billion-pound industry has Neville wanting more than just a slice of that pie, but in doing so he is also playing Jenga, risking the destruction of his own empire by trying to make it bigger.

Eventually, the tower falls, but whether saturation point has been reached, was crossed so long ago the line is now a dot, or is still far away, is up for interpretation.

In a season where Neville’s Overlap signed a deal with Disney+ and Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football expanded thanks to Netflix, it certainly feels close, but saturation is hard to measure.

Certainly though if Monday’s episode featuring Gerrard is anything to go by then this expansion already feels unsustainable, particularly if the main Overlap Daily podcasts remain over an hour in length.

Goldbridge’s 10-minute rant about Manchester City’s weird win over Liverpool has twice the views of Gerrard’s podcast on YouTube, and just a few minutes in you can realise why, because anyone who persevered with all 67 minutes of the former Liverpool captain dissecting the weekend’s action, without reading obituaries or seeking freshly painted walls for greater stimulation, deserves a share of the ad revenue themselves.

Gerrard was joined by presenter Ives, plus two bottles of Huel on the table, and like a liquid lunch it left you craving something with substance – or if it is ever going to be just one ex-player in the room, then at least one with charisma.

Add to that the scarcity non-Big Six clubs are mentioned – Neville even joked about Goldbridge wanting to discuss Sunderland vs Brighton – and the consumer will eventually have their own say.

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But all that will be figured out in time as the fight for eyeballs and ears rumbles on.

On Tuesday morning alone, my X algorithm fed me Sam Allardyce on his No Tippy Tappy Football podcast, clips from Monday Night Football, Carragher arguing with Simon Jordan, Goldbridge on his other podcast with Wayne Rooney, Richard Keys and Andy Gray rambling on their podcast, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes waffling on theirs, Rio Ferdinand defending Cristiano Ronaldo on his, Mark Zuckerberg sipping Guinness (okay not relevant), plus Jamie O’Hara and Jason Cundy having a talkSPORT banter-off.

So why not chuck more into the mix? The Overlap has sent this world into overdrive, and Neville will probably have long quit the game by the time this medium crumbles. In other words, if he keeps cashing in, who is he to care?

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The opening few months of Pierre Sage’s time as Crystal Palace boss have felt like the definition
of feast or famine football.

We may well be back to our usual mid-table position following Sunday’s 3-1 win at home to Nottingham Forest, but supporters are all a little dazed and confused by the journey taken to get there.

It was never going to be a straightforward task stepping into the sizeable shoes that Oliver
Glasner vacated in May.

Signing off in Leipzig with a victory over Rayo Vallecano in the Conference League final meant he had delivered three pieces of silverware for the club in 12 months, a feat put into perspective when you realise that we had no major honours to our name before his arrival.

Sage himself arrived in SE25 with trophy winning pedigree, having secured a first ever Coupe de
France for Lens in a season which saw them run the all-powerful Paris Saint-Germain as close as anyone in the league.

But taking on his first Premier League role at a club with such a glut of recent successes would be a daunting task for any coach.

The football Palace are playing is full throttle – we have created the second most “big chances” in the
league with 21, but also have the highest expected goals conceded (if you are into that sort of thing) at 12.8.

The result is a migraine-inducing mixture of blistering attacking play and all hands-on-deck defensive
scrambles.

I am sure it is tremendous fun for neutrals who happen to tune in, but when you are the
ones being put through the emotional wringer, it leaves you with a feeling of unease.

Prior to Sunday, our only win of the Premier League this term came away at rock bottom
Fulham, a clash in which we had twice fallen behind, only to win it 3-2, thanks, rather ridiculously,
to a trio of strikes from left-backs Tyrick Mitchell and Ben Chilwell.

There is no question about the team’s resilience.

It was on show in that outing at Craven Cottage, at home to Ipswich Town, where we fought back to level despite playing with 10 men and Sunday, with the early concession of a breakaway goal only appearing to strengthen our resolve.

It just doesn’t feel sustainable in the long-term.

To Sage’s credit, he is not attempting to paper over any cracks in post-match interviews, directly
addressing the need for a greater sense of defensive organisation to limit the mind-boggling
number of chances we are giving the sides we face.

It will have to come quickly, with Palace travelling out to face Lyon, a former club of his, in the Europa League this Thursday, before an away game at high-flying Brighton on Sunday and then another away trip in Europe, this time at Besiktas the Thursday after that.

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By anyone’s standards, that is a run of games that could see a team come unstuck very quickly,
particularly when you factor in the need for squad rotation, something we are yet to see Sage
implement successfully.

In an idyllic future paradise, we return from Istanbul with four wins from four, toasting the
Frenchman as a tactical genius and dreaming of the potential for more European glory in May.

Sadly, the nature of almost all of our displays under to him to date could easily see the complete
opposite occur, adding fuel to fires that naysayers are already stoking.

That Jekyll and Hyde seesaw is where I fear we as a fanbase are going to be forced to reside for
the rest of the campaign, a sense of eternal hope tinged with a nagging worry that the worst of
our traits may come and halt the party without a moment’s notice.

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If the debate during the international break was what to make of Matthias Jaissle’s strange start at Newcastle United, it feels like this one settled it.

The results might have been mid-table, but the performances have been heading in one direction since that rock-and-roll start against Liverpool.

They have been picking up points but the eyes don’t deceive you. Something needs to change. Newcastle need to rediscover the basics and become harder to beat as a matter of urgency.

If they don’t, things could get ugly quickly. That might sound knee-jerk given the fact that the Coventry City game turned on bad finishing and horrific defensive errors, but you cannot turn to favourable xG when most of your points this season have been won in spite of it.

How bad was this result? Desperate enough to prompt some soul searching with a side order of lessons to be learned quickly. To lose one away game 4-1 is bad but to follow it up on the road with another suggests deeper problems that Jaissle cannot just put down to growing pains and difficulty adopting his “vertical football” philosophy.

We can start with the formation. The Newcastle boss said he would not toss aside his principles on the back of the heavy defeat at Leeds United, and we can presume that resolve will remain, but this was game six and the issues are recurring.

The midfield gets too frequently overrun, there are huge holes all over the field, and the defence is being given no protection at all. All of this is being exacerbated by the system that Jaissle is wed to. Something needs to be sacrificed to get bodies into midfield.

Combine those formation issues with the sort of mistakes that inevitably come with recruiting a team of inexperienced youngsters and it feels like they are inviting trouble on themselves.

Lukas Hornicek – who, veering between excellent and error-prone in his first few games, has been a decent symbol of Newcastle’s season so far – was the man culpable in the early stages at Coventry, but he was far from alone.

In fact, all of the new signings seem to be enduring a baptism of fire in the Premier League. Matias Fernandez-Pardo clearly has something about him but he does not appear suited to playing as a striker, and missed a series of gilt-edged chances to get off the mark in the Premier League.

Bazoumana Toure came on with Newcastle chasing the game and stretched Coventry’s defence with his pace but he too often took the wrong option. The Magpies spent £115m on those three this season, they cannot afford for them to keep making mistakes.

Jaissle bristled during the international break when it was put to him that his favoured style couldn’t translate to the Premier League. Hansi Flick does it with Barcelona, he reasoned. But Flick has world-class talents, while Jaissle has potential, and as bright as some of the players who they’ve brought in are, it is a delicate balance when you’re working with young players.

When the heat is turned up – and it will be this week ahead of a tricky looking game against Aston Villa – how will they respond?

He could do with the veterans stepping up. Sven Botman might have scored a goal-of-the-season contender but he was largely poor, his form worrying since pre-season.

Fabian Schar and Dan Burn are knocking on the door. Newcastle turned down offers to sell Jacob Murphy, such was his importance in the dressing room. But he isn’t offering enough going forward. Even Joelinton, back again to offer heft in midfield, made mistakes during a chaotic, unsustainable final 20 minutes.

Jaissle will point to fine margins and there were points where Newcastle could have kick on in this contest. After Botman’s goal they looked likely to win and had Coventry on the rack but in some ways that is more alarming. Conspiring to lose 4-1 from a commanding position does not speak well about their game management.

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On Saturday Will Osula needs to start up front. Burn needs to return at centre-back and the spine needs to be stiffened. They look worse when Sean Steur does not play and perhaps him in a pivot with Nico Gonzalez – who was too easily bypassed at Coventry – might work if another body can be added in the engine room.

This week will be spent absorbing the lessons of this chastening defeat. Jaissle’s staff take part in a deep dive data-driven debrief after every game and insiders have noted how open-minded they are when confronted with the numbers. They will have to be because if they don’t change things, this season will run them over.

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Like those fawning Maga loyalists genuflecting before Donald Trump, the Manchester City faithful are so far on the wrong side of history as to be lost to us. 

But the players? What might the cost be to them of their misplaced hauteur at Anfield once the reckoning comes, glorying in a cause so abhorrent to the rest of us? Some defend the right of the players to celebrate since, they argue, none were party to the cheating for which City were clipped between 2009 and 2018.

Perhaps so. What we saw at Anfield was more than that. It was egregious defiance, a triple f**k you to the laws of the land, and an emphatic show of support for a corrupt club found guilty on all counts of financial wrongdoing, despite denials that continue to appeal.

Erling Haaland, that giant of a centre-forward who began the rout with a pitiless wallop, can never escape the arm-waving caress he directed at the supporters and the leadership. Rayan Cherki embroidered the day with a beauty of his own, then stuck out his chest with pride, oblivious to the scale of the crimes that brought City to this peak, and the fallout.

And let’s not forget the appalling triumphalism of Enzo Maresca, doing pirouettes on the touchline as if victory at Anfield held the same value as prior successes. All of it is tainted now. 

You might confine the cheating period, but you cannot separate today’s success from those fraudulent foundations, a sense of which was rammed home with the quality of all three goals. The dissonance of those celebrations was the story of the day, deepening the sense of injustice and dislocation. 

And it leaves the Premier League with an unforeseen problem. How is the season ever to continue in this poisonous, liminal context with a verdict ascribed but not yet punished? City will continue to flaunt their abusive power, denying all wrongdoing, while the just continue to wilt beneath the weight of it.

Section W of the Premier League rules, under which the City case was prosecuted, was not framed with this scale of corruption in mind. I mean, who would have imagined in the days before state ownership that any club might bend the rules to the tune of almost a billion quid to further multi-faceted global ambitions? 

And now we are faced with a repeat of the scenes at Anfield, sneaking into grounds via secret passages, the temperature rising with each goal, each fixture exacerbating the unreality of it all. 

Watching Noel Gallagher going bananas among the bananas typified the mood among City fans, and while that kind of emotion is defendable to a point, fan loyalty is ultimately exposed for what it is, another tool to be exploited by a corrupt and ruthless regime prepared to set fire to the whole shebang rather than admit wrongdoing.

Gallagher will not see himself a stooge of Abu Dhabi’s grand design, but that is exactly what he is, doing the work for them by placing his fame and celebrity uncritically at the service of cheats for whom the interests of fans is entirely secondary. For most, Gallagher and fellow devotee and brother, Liam, are Oasis. Definitely, not maybe, singing for their supper.

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• The Score: Man City’s giant two fingers, Spurs’ question mark and Forest furious

Whatever Abu Dhabi hoped to achieve via ownership of City, improving the lot of Manchester’s citizens was not principal among them, merely a by-product of a much bigger game, the association with which has even thrown up awkward questions for the Prime Minister to answer. 

City’s next three fixtures are all at home, starting with the visit of Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League on Wednesday. There is unlikely to be any dissent from that quarter given PSG is the state-owned engine driving Qatar’s own propaganda machine. 

It might be different a week Saturday at Aston Villa, however, a club on the hook for £19.5m, levied by Uefa in June for squad cost rule breaches. Villa admitted their offence and accepted the settlement. The fools. 

from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/f1ylvpn