If it wasn’t enough to have their revival cut off in its embryonic stage at Selhurst Park, Manchester City were then notified Storm Darragh had grounded their flight home. Needing to take the bus instead, the only surprise is they did not miss it.
Everything else is running away from Pep Guardiola and his broken squad, which of course includes Liverpool, who feared a chunk of their lead in the table would disappear on a day when the Merseyside derby was lost to the storms.
But this version of City is not the opportunistic marauder with whom we have grown so familiar, meaning they twice trailed Crystal Palace and finished with only a single point and 10 men. Irrespective of their protests that Rico Lewis’s second yellow card was harsh, it does leave Guardiola down by a player for next weekend’s Manchester derby when he could ill afford to lose any more.
Guardiola’s dressing-room message to his limping squad in the wake of a 2-2 draw was that they must not wallow in self-pity after a run of one win in nine across all competitions. Easier said than done, perhaps most of all for the manager himself, who has invited the violins throughout the injury crisis.
‘What I told to the players (was) do not feel sorry, please,’ Guardiola said. ‘Accept the challenge will maybe be more difficult and at the end we will have more satisfaction in how we behave with these problems as we had in seasons when we won the title. All the teams want the players fit and since the beginning it could not happen.’
To give Guardiola his due, it is undoubtedly a severe situation, highlighted by the absence on Saturday of seven men he would consider starters and a bench that included six men aged 22 or younger and two goalkeepers.
Manchester City were dropped more points as they drew 2-2 with Crystal Palace in London
With City’s title challenge already reliant on a Liverpool collapse, the imperative is that their slump does not kill the Champions League campaign at the group stage.
At 17th in those standings, and currently tracking for an unseeded spot in the play-offs to reach the knockout rounds, they face Juventus in Turin on Wednesday.
Guardiola has disclosed none of his walking wounded are due back between now and then, with an estimate that it will be ‘three weeks to a month’ before the burden eases.
It’s fairly bleak, and indeed unfortunate, but they have enough fit components of world-class calibre, within one of the most expensively assembled squads in sporting history, that any woe-is-me routine should be taken in extreme moderation.
On Saturday that meant a side featuring Erling Haaland, who scored his 13th of the season in cancelling out Daniel Munoz’s opener, and a fit-again Kevin De Bruyne, who is regain his edge and played a role in Lewis’s equaliser after Maxence Lacroix put Palace 2-1 up.
Palace were excellent, especially Will Hughes, and Oliver Glasner has now built a four-game unbeaten run.
But they faced a Guardiola side that has no confidence, no ball-winners in the centre of the pitch, and a shape regularly exposed when Lewis was caught in his transitions between left back and midfield. Press them hard, as Palace did, and they will fold.
That was the case when City conceded inside 15 minutes for the seventh time this season. Kyle Walker kept them onside and was also at blame for the second – it is a sad and recurring narrative for one of England’s finest players of the past two decades.
Pep Guardiola’s men look a shadow of the team that has dominated the league for years
Guardiola added: ‘When we arrive latter stages in treble season, and this kind of stuff, it is because everyone was there and involved. We have in these (bench) positions (at Palace) James McAtee, Jack (Grealish), Jeremy (Doku), others from the academy.
‘It is going to happen the same for the next three weeks or month. It is not a question of luck. It is life. It sometimes happens, you have to accept it, it is the challenge. We knew the season would be like this.
‘We are going to try one way or the other.’ Unlike the stranded plane, the ship may have sailed.
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