A patchy Manchester City showing is still enough to ease past West Ham

West Ham were stubborn and Manchester City were a little lethargic, but City are the current kings of creating the moments that win matches.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. For just about one day following Arsenal’s evisceration of whatever on earth Chelsea are supposed to be at the moment, there was a slender possibility that the race might have life left in it.

It may yet do, but there were few signs of serious stuttering from Manchester City as they got past West Ham United in the Premier League, even though their performance at times was a little shaky and West Ham put up a bigger challenge to Manchester City than the final 3-0 scoreline would suggest.

Both teams came into the match with slightly unusual line-ups. West Ham through the bad luck of an outbreak of illness and Manchester City through Pep Guardiola’s essential Pepness.

Knocked back off the top of the league by a confident performance from Arsenal? Rest the goalkeeper. Five games to go in a title race was certainly a bold time of the season for him to give Stefan Ortega his first Premier League start, but Ortega finished the night with a clean sheet, so perhaps it wasn’t as strange as it had originally seemed. Elsewhere, Bernardo Silva and Nathan Ake replaced Ilkay Gundogan and Manuel Akanji, while West Ham were missing Tomas Soucek, Declan Rice and Nayef Aguerd, three players they could ill-afford to be without. 

There was little of the intensity of another step in the title race inside The Etihad Stadium. Empty seats were clearly visible, and the crowd was somewhat lethargic. This is unsurprising. After all, it is the fourth time in five years that they’ve been here and the Champions League is the silverware in the distance that is shining the brightest.

But the feeling of mild lethargy seemed to spread to the pitch where, after a bright opening, Manchester City started to get a little sloppy, allowing West Ham a couple of sustained periods of possession. The crowd started to lift itself. “Come on City! Come on City!” Within seconds, Julian Alvarez broke on the left and it took a sliding block from Aaron Cresswell to prevent the cross reaching an unmarked Erling Haaland. Bar a couple of speculative efforts from distance, this was as much as Manchester City managed in the first twenty minutes.

When a team wins as consistently and effortlessly as Manchester City have over the last few years, it becomes easy to forget that human emotions are involved at this time of…