No team in the PL this season can get 100 points. Liverpool have now dropped more points than City did in the entirety of the 17/18 season. Considering Liverpool’s fantastic record this season, it makes you realise what an incredible league record that City team really had.
Ederson
Walker
Delph
Kompany
Stones
Fernandinho
Silva
De Bruyne
Sterling
Sane
Aguero
& more
Delph's story is an interesting one amongst those stellar names.
Once hailed as the next bright young thing at Leeds, the plaudits for the midfielder continued when he left his native Yorkshire for Aston Villa. Universally, the media supported the move and predicted great things at an apparently rejuvenated giant of a club.
However, history repeated itself and as had happened at Leeds earlier in his career the Birmingham club's relaunch into the big time turned out to be a damp squib. Although, still highly regarded, his career had undoubtedly hit something of a dead end.
City came calling but Delph remained loyal. Within a week if turning City down, Villa started selling off other star mames. It was clear as day they were in financial difficulty. Seeing this, City asked again and this time Delph agreed.
Unlike his celebrated departure away from his home county to a resurgent Midlands, his return to the North was treated with contempt.
Delph was pilloried in the Press, sneered at and even dehumanised on social media and subsequently booed from the stands of every away ground.
To make matters worse, he couldn't even command a place in midfield. He had to make do with a spot at left back. With the benefot of hindsight, even the dogs in the Press Room now know this was a pioneering innovation but back then, they gleefully presented it as proof of City's wasteful spending, Pep Guardiola's eccentricity and Fabian Delph's personal failure.
Within the next four years, he won two league titles. One of them with the Centurions. In pure league terms, categorically, the greatest side, English football has ever seen.
Interestingly, he has never surfaced as a pundit. Maybe that work doesn't interest him or maybe it does but ( no doubt, duein no small part to the media's hate campaign against him) he possibly doesn't appeal to the stations' beloved focus groups.
His tale can be interpreted as a microcosm of the media's shameful downplaying of the Centurions magnificent achievement.