Looking back at the scores, and the timeline, because you forget things.
There were signs from way back. Us beating them conclusively at their gaff in February (without even playing the football we know we can play) was one. But prior to that they'd drawn at home to Brentford, and lost away to Everton. They then seemed to pick themselves up. They got the results. But I for one thought that it was strange that they went 2-0 down to Villa in the first place, not that they finally won it in eight minutes of injury time.
They then went out of the Europa League to a useful, but hardly ogre-like, Sporting Lisbon. I never saw that as an advantage, as many on here did. I thought, “Putting extra pressure on themselves by putting all their eggs in one basket”.
Cracks were appearing. The truth is that they played their most scintillating and solid football before the WC break, and to some extent in January after it – until they met us in the Cup.
April, obviously, was an unqualified disaster for them. All the draws they got before coming to us were moral defeats. Getting a draw against a team, Southampton, that everyone else had been spanking was not a mentality monster triumph, which is the way it was being spun by some. I thought the same about the Bournemouth game in March. To squeak through, again in injury time, again against a team that everyone else had been caning for fun was a sign not of strength, but of strain.
Things had been leading up to what happened at the Etihad, although I will admit that I didn't expect the gulf in class to be revealed quite so starkly. But then, this team constantly surprises me: I didn't expect the gulf in class to be so stark one week ago. (Only one week! Christ, it seems like a lifetime ago, already. We've won a three-in-a-row since then…) Who did?
I was quietly confident that everything was adding up. What was surprising given the football we often played in the first half of the season was not that we weren't top, but that we were even still in the conversation for winning the league at the halfway mark.
Their season reached its high-water mark shortly after the WC, and then started to decline, and ours started to get serious shortly after that.
So yes, there were plenty of grounds for continuing to believe.
