Moment I: Slow motion genius
Some players have this knack of slowing down time. It sounds implausible, a physical impossibility, but when you watch some players in full flow, there really is no other way to describe it. On Sunday, one of those players set the tone for the biggest game of the season in the English Premier League.
Just as Manchester City vs. Arsenal ticked over the quarter-hour mark, Rayan Cherki decided to slow time.
Now, to set the scene, Cherki isn’t your typical late-era Pep Guardiola footballer. He doesn’t really keep it short and simple, he hates sticking to one position, he prefers a dribble over a square pass, and you can’t really ask him to run up and down all day long. Plus he shows off like he’s the best player in a schoolyard, letting all around him know just how good he is, rubbing their face in, showboating whenever he can — a rabona when a regular cross would suffice (especially when his right foot is just as good as his left), a couple of juggles down the line with the express intent of mocking his marker, a flick here and a nutmeg there even if doesn’t add “progression” and “value” to the move itself. In fact, Guardiola is must-see television when Cherki is on the ball — the levels of annoyance he reaches is hilarious.
On Sunday, though, Cherki also showed he’s your typical any-era Pep Guardiola genius. When he picks up the ball off Matheus Nunes just outside the Arsenal box, there’s not much on. In front of him is lined the best defence in the land, with their spine of Gabriel Magalhães and William Saliba in front of him and Declan Rice to his left — this whole season, it’s been nigh on impossible to get through this trio in the middle.
Cherki, though, doesn’t care. Picking up the ball he races into the Arsenal box, running at Gabriel, ramping the pace up to the kind of speed at which only he sees things in slow-motion. Gabriel, squared up and wrong footed after a subtle shake of the hips that the defender involuntarily reacted to, stretched out a leg and Cherki simply dribbled past it.
Rice snapped in with another tackle, on his blind side, but Cherki saw it coming and shifted the ball to his right. With the massive frame of Saliba sliding in from further down on the left, his next shot was a snap hit into the far side-netting.
In real time, the sequence of events — the shift away from Gabriel, the jink away from Rice, hitting it before Saliba reaches him, all happening inside two seconds — makes no sense. In Cherki’s world, though, it’s the most obvious route to goal. For in that rarefied air, two seconds is all you need to create magic.
Moment II: Power and precision
Erling Haaland and Gabriel had been engaged in… how do you put this politely… a wrestling match all game. The big Brazilian centre-back had managed to keep the bigger Norwegian centre-forward quiet for most of it.
The problem for Arsenal, though, is that keeping Haaland quiet doesn’t say much because the forward rarely gets involved in a game unless it’s to decide it — and that’s’ what Gabriel seemingly forgot. Another completely atypical Pep Guardiola player (‘pass? What’s a pass?’), he’s also a typical Pep Guardiola matchwinner, and in the 65th minute, he reminded Gabriel of that base fact.
It started with Gianluigi Donnarumma finding an inexplicably unmarked Nico O’Reilly, and the Man City fullback/midfielder/whatever-he-wants-to-be ran the length of the pitch, exchanged passes with Jérémy Doku, and slapped a ball across the face of the goal where Gabriel was utterly focused on outmuscling Haaland. Until the ball passed the melee in the middle, Gabriel was sure he had Haaland in his hands, keeping the forward between him and the ball. In a snap, though, Haaland made his move. Holding off Gabriel with absurd ease, he slipped around him and was easily first to the ball. Falling, pulled down by Gabriel, off-balance, Haaland swept it into the far corner with a finish of ridiculous accuracy.
The finish was sublime, as usual for Haaland, but it’s what preceded it that made it happen. In a split second, Haaland had won the one battle-of-brawn that mattered the most, and with it Man City had flattened Arsenal to put another intriguing twist in a Premier League title race that promises to go down to the wire.
