Saying you saw this City team as special as Arsenal's Invincibles

The curtain came down in rather fitting style. Mohamed Salah among the goals, a fabulous pass from Kevin de Bruyne and Manchester City breaking most, if not all, records on an otherwise predictable afternoon.

On the final day, we saw the best of 2017-18 but also its flaws. A great team, some great players, but not the greatest season.

The same points total that confirmed West Ham’s relegation in 2003 took them to 13th this year. City have been wonderful, but, more generally, this has not been a vintage campaign.

Still, as the sun shone on the South Coast, the final seconds ticked down, and De Bruyne dropped a sublime through-ball on to the left boot of Gabriel Jesus, the negatives melted away. Jesus took one, perfect, touch, switching the ball to his right, and dinked it over Alex McCarthy, advancing from Southampton’s goal.

It nestled in the net in front of the away end: the clock read 93 minutes and three seconds. Just as they had on this day six years ago, Manchester City maintained the excitement until the last kick.

True, this was never going to be a match for the exquisite tension of Sergio Aguero’s winner to clinch the first title of the Sheik Mansour era — what is? — but Jesus rewrote the record book so that Pep Guardiola’s class of 2017-18 is the headline entry on so many of its pages.

The first team to reach 100 points; the highest win percentage in history (84.2 per cent); the biggest title-winning margin (19 points clear of Manchester United); the most prolific goal-scorers since the early Sixties (106).

City couldn’t quite overtake the points-per-game total of the Preston North End ‘Invincibles’ in 1888-89 — if adjusted to the era of three points for a win — recording 2.63 points per game, compared to Preston’s 2.64.

Then again, they have had to tolerate certain limitations Preston’s players would have found novel. Like a crossbar, for instance, and pitch markings except for a centre line. Preston’s goalkeeper Robert Mills-Roberts doubled as the house surgeon at Birmingham General Hospital, and was also in the habit of putting up an umbrella during matches when it rained — which, to be fair, wouldn’t entirely limit Claudio Bravo’s performances.

He could also handle the ball anywhere he liked on the field (again...). It is fair to say they were very different times. And Manchester City have won 10 more matches than Preston played in the league in that invincible season. So we shouldn’t be too harsh over the missing 0.01 points.

Nor on Manchester City, despite wider disquiet over the sovereign source of their wealth. At least the money is being spent increasing the gaiety of nations. Manchester City entertain and excite. They try to win playing beautifully and without compromise.

Take them away and what is there?

The second-placed team in the league, Manchester United, can be very pragmatic, and last season’s champions, Chelsea, were too timid to leave their half at the Etihad Stadium in March — and have been mystifyingly dismal in this final week of the season, too, marshalled by what looks like a man with a grudge.

Liverpool undoubtedly have the potential to win a first title of the modern era under Jurgen Klopp next year, but in this are some 25 points short, while increasingly, the bottom half of the league is engaged in a quest for survival from August and surprises are few.

Southampton stayed up by three points having won seven games all season and Huddersfield got safe with just 28 goals — or 0.73 per game. No, it wasn’t a vintage season, even if the survival of all three promoted sides for only the third time in Premier League history is a positive.

So make the most of City. One day, saying you saw this team will be almost as special as having witnessed the Matthews Final, Arsenal’s Invincibles or Manchester United’s treble. It’s not going to be an exclusive club — 1,750,286 is the combined attendance for City’s league matches this season, more than 300,000 more than saw Arsenal in 2003-04 — but it is going to be an inspired one.

Guardiola, like Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson in a previous Premier League era, is changing our expectations of a title-winning team. The way his squad have played, the pace they have set is why neutrals are drawn more to the promise and ambition of Liverpool or even Tottenham, rather than the second-best team in the country, Manchester United.

Set against City, United can at times appear rather joyless; functional rather than expansive in victory. Jose Mourinho has improved them, of that there is no doubt — and they will undoubtedly be favoured to win the FA Cup, the way Antonio Conte has becalmed Chelsea in these final two matches — but it is not just 19 points that has separated red and blue in Manchester this season.

It is a sense of style, of panache. City have never failed to score in consecutive games in the Guardiola era — in fact the last time a Guardiola team failed to do so was Bayern Munich in May 2015.

On Tuesday, Guardiola may get the Manager of the Year Award from the League Managers’ Association; or he may not. There is a lot of support for the fine job Sean Dyche has done at Burnley, and no wonder. A club that many saw as engaged in a permanent fight against relegation instead ending up challenging Arsenal for a Europa League place — although the nine points separating them by the end was not unreasonable.

Dyche is one of those unfashionable British managers we are always told are under-rated —although not by the LMA, who have recently found occasion to laud Eddie Howe, Brendan Rodgers, Roy Hodgson, Alan Pardew and David Moyes, but not Roberto Mancini, Manuel Pellegrini or Carlo Ancelotti.

Moyes has been voted Manager of the Year more times than Wenger, which may come to be seen as an oversight — unless Moyes has a few tricks up his sleeve that mean, on retirement, he, too, will be discussed as the man who changed football.

Wenger bowed out with Arsenal on Sunday recording his 707th win in 1,235 games at the club. On the 22nd minute — one for each year in England — the crowd at the John Smith’s Stadium, Huddersfield, stood to give him an ovation. This follows a presentation at Old Trafford and farewell speeches at the Emirates Stadium.

Deep down, though, he will have hated spending his last few weeks as a ceremonial manager — while, conversely, some contemporaries will have hankered for just a smidgeon of the gratitude that has gone Wenger’s way.

Moyes, Sam Allardyce, Claude Puel, Darren Moore and Javi Gracia are five who can justifiably claim to have done all that was asked of them, and may still be out of work come summer.

The transfers are these days only part of the close-season narrative. It is not unfeasible that there will be as many as seven managerial changes before August.

Players? One of the greatest there has been, in this or any era, will no longer be with us if Wayne Rooney leaves Everton for DC United.

It will be said that his return to Goodison Park has been disappointing — yet he is the club’s top scorer, their leading assist-maker and scored the hat-trick against West Ham that turned their season.

If Michael Carrick was deserving of his send-off at Manchester United, and Yaya Toure at Manchester City, then most certainly Rooney deserves to be recalled more fondly then his critics allow.

He isn’t what he was, no. Then again — think of the shot from close to the halfway line that defeated Joe Hart in November and consider that was the work of a talent on the wane.

Manchester United’s top scorer, England’s top scorer, Rooney deserves to be remembered as an all-time great.

The scoring feat of the season, though, belongs to Salah: 32 Premier League goals, the most of any player in a 38-game season. His battle with Harry Kane went to the final day, Klopp admitting he had already removed his man against Brighton when he heard Tottenham had scored five against Leicester.

The dreadful feeling that Kane might have got all five, and with it the Golden Boot, crept over him — as much a tribute to the Tottenham man, as evidence of his loyalty to Salah. As it was, Kane could only manage two and the Egyptian now has a clean sweep of individual awards in the domestic game.

If Liverpool can keep hold of him — and he is showing no sign of wishing to leave — it is the thought of a Salah-inspired challenge to Manchester City next season that will drive anticipation of Premier League 2018-19 through the next 13 weeks.

And with City succeeding Chelsea, remember it was 2009 when the title was last retained. No matter how good his team have been this year, history suggests it will not be so easy for Guardiola next time around.