Nobody left early. Nobody stopped singing. Nobody grizzled or grumbled or booed or barracked. Ipswich have spent long enough out of this walled garden not to take its pleasures for granted, even if those pleasures occasionally include getting spanked 6-0 by the quadruple champions. Equally, this is a result the rest of the Premier League will not thank them for.
Since Sammie Szmodics sensationally squeezed them ahead at the Etihad Stadium in August, Ipswich have now given up 10 unanswered goals to Manchester City in 173 minutes of football. And if that was partly stage fright, here they were more complicit: a collapse up there with their worst performances of the season, perhaps even playing an edgy City back into some kind of form.
Ipswich 0-6 Manchester City: Premier League reaction – live
And – oh, look – here they are, back in the top four, a month unbeaten, clawing their way back to competence with 20 goals in 19 days of January, against an admittedly mixed range of opponents. They are still worryingly open at times, still occasionally liable to getting cut right through the middle. But this Pep Guardiola team does at least look like a Pep Guardiola team again.
More ominously, their big players are beginning to warm to the task. Kevin De Bruyne was quite bad for half an hour here, but buoyed by a slightly fortuitous assist looked hungrier and sharper than at any point since his injury. Erling Haaland missed an early one-on-one but eventually celebrated the first goal bonus of his new decade-long contract. Then you have Phil Foden.
How City missed that Big Phil Energy during that turbulent autumn period. How different a prospect they now look with him back in form, prowling the edge of the penalty area, cutting in off the right, drifting and menacing. He scored the first goal, made the second for Mateo Kovacic, scored the third.
The ever-dangerous Jérémy Doku added a fourth and Haaland a fifth, before James McAtee brought the City bench to their feet with his first Premier League goal. For Ipswich, embroiled in a bruising game with Brighton on Thursday night, the legs began to fail them late on but arguably their heads went much earlier. By the second half, after a string of simple errors in possession, they were openly beginning to argue on the pitch.
It was clever from Guardiola to relentlessly attack the Ipswich right flank, where Ben Johnson had a torrid game against Doku and new signing Ben Godfrey alongside him was clearly still on Serie A time. The first four goals all came from that side: Foden bundling home De Bruyne’s deflected cross, then setting up Kovacic from 18 yards, and then converting De Bruyne’s cut-back under the squirming hands of Christian Walton.
That was probably the moment at which Ipswich imploded. Up front Liam Delap was still making a nuisance of himself, still wriggling and wrestling himself into clear air, but every time they lost the ball Ipswich were vulnerable. Doku beautifully shuffled the ball in early in the second half with Johnson and Omari Hutchinson still bawling at each other over an earlier miscommunication.
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Next it was Jack Clarke’s turn to err, ruining a sharp performance with a suicidal sideways pass straight to Doku, who kindly slipped in Haaland. “Ten more years,” the City fans sang. Both coaches rolled on the substitutes after that, and amid the half-paced apathy of the denouement McAtee ended the slaughter with a beautifully timed run and smart looping header.
Are City back? Paris in midweek will probably give us a better idea of that. Are Ipswich done? Absolutely not. This was a horrific afternoon, and Anfield next weekend is a devilishly tough place to bounce back. But they’re still fighting, still credible, still united. Nobody expects them to be here next season. But then nobody expected them to be breathing this air in the first place.
