Big, big favourites, Jose Mourinho called them. And you could almost sense a smirk.
What he actually meant was… big, big pressure on my old mate Manuel Pellegrini.
And he is right. You could sense it at a fraught Etihad on Saturday, you could sense it in his muddled team selection and tactics, you could sense it in his relief at the final whistle.
Squeaky bum time for Pellegrini has started before the Christmas decorations have come down.
Yes, Edin Dzeko’s ill-deserved strike against Crystal Palace sent Manchester City to the top of the table. Yes, Joe Hart’s resilient and accomplished performance bodes well for the rest of the season.
Yes, you always suspected weight of possession and the introduction of stellar players would clinch the contest for the Blues.
But it was with sturdy justification that Pellegrini cut an anxious figure.
He was expected to win this game easily – just as he is expected to win the Premier League easily despite this being his first season in the competition.
He has the strongest squad, the biggest budget.
And those expectations will begin to weigh heavily on his shoulders, particularly as his team have now hit the front.
But behind the undoubted value of a victory achieved on an off-day lay suggestions City should not be big, big favourites. Warm favourites, sure. Yet that much-vaunted squad depth
hardly trumpeted itself against an unsurprisingly well-organised and hard-working Tony Pulis team.
There were plenty of individuals who underlined just why they would not be first-choice features of this side.
Javi Garcia was strikingly immobile in the centre of midfield and Dedryck Boyata had precious little impact on proceedings.
His goal apart, Dzeko struggled alarmingly, his limited mobility and application thrown into pin-sharp focus by the efforts of Alvaro Negredo in previous games. It was slightly odd, though, that Dzeko was sent out pretty much as a lone striker when Pellegrini has generally favoured a front two.
Maybe with Sergio Aguero still out injured and Stevan Jovetic out, he would argue he had little option.
And you could not blame Pellegrini for wanting to rest Negredo, Yaya Toure and Samir Nasri but, with Garcia generally going about his business with a destructive mindset (at times, he operated like a third centre-half), City did not pour forward with their usual flamboyance.
With commitments in four competitions, Pellegrini knows he needs to be able to use all resources available to him. Yet he could only trust his reserve line-up for less than an hour.
And had Dzeko not woken up and struck, Toure would, no doubt, have joined Nasri and Negredo out there.
Of course, it seems churlish to highlight the deficiencies of this performance. It is yet another home win and puts City top. There were some valuable contributions, not least from Hart whose bravery at the feet of Cameron Jerome earned him a brutal eye wound.
If this game taught Pellegrini one thing, it was that Hart’s permanence on the team sheet should not be threatened again.
But you can rest assured this game told him plenty more.
That his squad is not strong enough for complacency, that resting too many key players at once is dangerous… and that the big, big pressure is only just beginning.
What an utter ****. He does make some valid points but most of that is just sheer unadulterated shite.