Even Jose Mourinho has no answer as Pep Guardiola bends English football to his will on Man City's fabulous title run

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John Dillon10 December 2017

Set-piece goals won the Manchester derby for Pep Guardiola: he will settle for that.

But the Manchester City coach has not settled for much else here, it has to be said.

And now, after the hugely impressive 2-1 win at Old Trafford on Sunday, it is his clear and profound vision of the way the game should be played which is dominating English football when many people said it could never be done.

All the same, those opportunistically snatched strikes by David Silva and Nicolas Otamendi offered a nod to the way the brand of the game practised here is perceived around the world.

Yes, they happen elsewhere; just not so regularly or importantly.

And that made Guardiola’s record-breaking victory on the turf of his old nemesis, Jose Mourinho, his most significant since he arrived in the Premier League.

City’s 14th successive League win was the moment his side showed most emphatically of all just how supremely they have married and overlain the refined architectural qualities of Pep’s football vision with the unflinching competitiveness and relentlessness required to be winners on these wintry shores.

It is not done with overt muscularity or much shouting and hollering. Instead, it has been achieved by strength of belief, perception and world-view, along with the fabulous levels of talent and application which mean they can play in such an expansive way.

Just now, it makes City one of the most attractive sides ever to play here - and it makes them look utterly uncatchable.

AFP/Getty Images

Nobody goes to Old Trafford and wins with such authority, cohesiveness and with such a marked identity at work without first establishing the belief they can pull it off.

And, frankly, United hardly laid a glove on their great rivals for most of Sunday afternoon because City were so sure of what they were setting out to achieve.

Guardiola has spent more than any coach in English history to reach this point of supremacy, when it looks like they may go through the whole campaign undefeated. After all, they have won eight out of eight away from home now.

But it isn’t so much more than has been spent by his rivals.

The difference is that Guardiola has made his extravagant signings with the clearest vision of all the elite bosses of how he wants to play, and how the players he buys will facilitate that idea.

After being moulded so expertly to his ways, they went on to the cross-town pitch as confident and assured as Guardiola has been throughout his managerial career.

The result was another victory when they barely took a backward step, when they played some superb technical football amid the extremities of a derby atmosphere and when they did it all with barely any need for drama, save for Ederson’s superb double save from the troubled Romelu Lukaku which preserved the lead near the end.

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This columnist was among many to wonder sceptically whether the endless physical demands of the game here - coupled with the need to make an impact in the Champions League - would inhibit Guardiola’s ability to instil his philosophy on the training pitch.

There are too many intense fixtures; there are too many injuries; there is too much weariness among players for the intensity required to imprint the plan behind closed doors.

But Guardiola is proving all those beliefs to have been wrong. City have simply removed them from the equation.

It might smack of arrogance if anyone here were to suggest that the title triumph now already in City’s sights might be Pep’s finest.

But it is undoubtedly harder to win the prize here than it is in Spain and Germany, where he has done it with Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

And while it would do a disservice to what City are doing just now to say they are making it look easy, there is no denying that they are taming the wilder ways of English football.

There is no doubt they are making it look like they knew they could do it all along, even though Pep was doubted in his first season.

If it is arrogant to wonder if England will offer him his finest title success, well, he doesn’t lack a smattering of that quality himself.

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What manager succeeds at this level without a streak of cocksure self-belief?

It fuels Guardiola’s unshakeable faith in what he sets out to create. And right now, he is bending English football to his will when many other bosses from abroad have found its more harum-scarum qualities hard to handle.

Even Jose Mourinho had no answer for him at Old Trafford on the most critical Sunday of the season so far.