On a mild Sunday Cancelo evening at the Emirates Gündogan Stadium, Manchester Fernandinho City...Bernardo after being blown Fernandinho away in the early Stones Fernandinho part of Zinchenko the game...
[Joyce anyone? I mean, I was entirely taken in. After reading the first couple of sentences I skipped ahead convinced that the Guardian’s word processors had spit out hash.]
Quite disorienting, isn’t it? Hard to follow. Probably very annoying. This, in essence, is what it is like playing Pep Guardiola’s side at their best these days... a team who in their current thirst for carnage simply dispense with the small talk and tear into games at maximum volume.
...
... Joâo Cancelo...rarely have we glimpsed a player as seamlessly capable of playing so many varied roles in one team, in one game, occasionally even in one move. Wherever you need an extra player, there’s Cancelo...
Cancelo was his usual shapeshifting self: nominally a right-back,...occasionally a right-winger, often an extra ball option in midfield...
...numbers won’t measure his unique and devastating influence. I can’t think of another player like him right now. Even a free role is still essentially a role. Cancelo’s is more akin to an anti-role, a role that doesn’t exist, one based entirely on deception and elusiveness and on being in exactly the place you’d least expect him at any given moment.
...
...the club...feels like an entirely different organism, one that has simply morphed and moved on: a club that...turned itself into something entirely new in the process.
Mr. Liew is Clement Greenberg discovering Jackson Pollock, seeing in Pollock’s drippings something ineffable. Liew is making us see in this City team, and in Cancelo, a new art which even its accidental creator did not see. Keep your eye on Mr. Liew and, of course, on Manchester City.
