It’s been a series of overthought, slightly perfunctory, slightly performative, overanalysed decisions of whether fans should jeer, cheer, or do that thing football fandom never allows for, and let what has been, be.
For all that, Manchester United’s biggest defiance in this derby was their fans’ refusal to partake in the home crowd’s Mexican wave. Their most aggressive statement was their booing of Oasis before the first whistle.
Ultimately, rivalry is relational. Beyond the obvious local factor, it is ultimately impossible to contextualise this result without eyes turning to Sunday’s games down in London. News and momentum travel fast.
Title races as fragile as the WSL in recent years seem characterised less by the slow death of jeopardy, but rather a long wait for its end, the slow subsiding to a natural, Chelsea-drawn close.
In a season where each title hope has been emblazoned with imperfections, any angsty outsiders need to be whittling out wins until that wait is over.
In the weekend’s prime-time spot, a sole Saturday WSL headliner at the Etihad, the season still preciously in undecided balance, there’s still an ephemeral primetime potential. Players can still be half-gods, half-underdogs, still standing to scrap something solid for the new year.
For City, there’s the sense they could be as close as they were when they last led the league this far into a season, two years ago, before a superior Chelsea goal difference on the final day denied them.
They followed up that season with a 17-point lag behind them last campaign, but if the chance of losing out again on goal difference is haunting City, they seem intent on chasing down any ghosts early on.
This time, they had a previous derby day goal scorer on the opposing side.
Jess Park has stolen the limelight since her cross-city switch with Grace Clinton, and, for the first half hour, it was a story of a tightly contested, technical midfield.
The abundance of agility that both sides boast in the likes of Park, Ella Toone, Aoba Fujino, Yui Hasegawa and Hinata Miyazawa seemed to create a minigame of elegant flicks, each one trying to find space on the half-turn by running behind players just turning back from their own half-turn. But for all the frantically fun footwork by some of the best the WSL has to offer, the breakthrough bypassed the floor altogether.
The first goal was a link of looping headers finished by Rebecca Knaak for City’s seventh headed goal of the league.
For the second, Jade Rose strolled past a midfield with so little struggle it was as if it had been vacated for an emergency, with only Kerstin Casparij and Khadija Shaw left to pin-pointedly pick up the pieces.
And there might have been a midfield there in presence, but not spirit nor speed to challenge Lauren Hemp’s standing-start of a strike outside the box for the third.
By half-time, the half-turn looked a defunct, baroque detail of a game made of something more raw, physical, clinical.
Andrée Jeglertz’s four-month reign has so far divorced City from the devotion of possession, and tilted them towards the rapid hunt of transitions.
Hemp’s return gave them a new dimension, and they are finally able to utilise the simultaneous fitness of two forwards in Shaw and Vivianne Miedema, who, combined, account for nearly 4% of the goals scored in the entire history of the WSL. It is no surprise that City have scored the most in the league, and via the most varied sources of scorers.
In a shared clip of Jeglertz talking to his side at half-time away at Everton, he asserts a refusal to see his players relying on things to sort themselves out on their own, by anyone but themselves, to give in to the crime of passivity. Instead, they seem intent on moulding this season themselves, each hunting transition at a time.
He told them in the build-up to the derby to “play the game, not the event.” Perhaps their counterparts fell into that trap. Throughout the second half, United looked lost in a sea of blue as if they’d been invited to the event by a friend of a friend, and didn’t really know which door led to where.
From the four clean sheets in their first four matches, they have conceded eight in the last five.
From being the second-highest scorers in the league, they have failed to score for the second game running. Rivalries often exposed the gaps.
Now seven points adrift from City, perhaps this will define United’s exit from the foot race. Even above them, Arsenal suffered a “big hit” at Bayern midweek in a season of small, humbling jabs.
Chelsea remain unbeaten, but unconvincing: two facts that seem to have increasingly little to do with each other the longer their 33 games without a loss go on.
Saturday provided the latest statement to answer Chelsea’s demand to be pushed all the way; City stay front of the queue. Enjoy it for all its worth, for as long as it lasts.
Photograph by James Gill/Danehouse/Getty