Manchester City’s senior citizens stand up to hint at a rosier end to the season

If there is such a thing as a Manchester City way in the Abu Dhabi era, it is to leave themselves almost too much to do before finally getting their act together and scraping over the line in the final usable seconds.

That, famously, is how they won the Premier League title in 2012, chasing down a nine-point deficit, collapsing on the final day before winning the league with the last kick. In 2014, City waited for first Arsenal, then Chelsea, then Liverpool to blow their title challenge before sneaking in at the end. When City won the Capital One Cup that year, beating Sunderland in the final, they had to concede the lead to Fabio Borini before realising that this was a Wembley final and was in fact worthy of some attention.

This weekend, two years on, City are back at Wembley to face Liverpool for the same trophy. And they flew back from Kiev on Wednesday night looking like a team giving serious thought to waking up.

City produced one of their performances of the season at the Olympic Stadium, silencing the crowd and winning by an unflattering 3-1 scoreline. It was as well as they have played since winning by the same margin at Sevilla almost four months ago. Their passage into the Champions League quarter-finals, for the first time ever, is essentially assured.

All of City’s senior players, those who delivered the 2012 and 2014 titles, stood up in Ukraine to remind everyone of what they are capable.

Vincent Kompany, whose season has been ruined by calf injuries, gave his best performance of the year. So did Yaya Touré and David Silva, two players who have found their sixth season at City their hardest, with form and fitness problems not allowing them to set the standard in the Premier League in the way they are used to.

Sergio Aguero looked sharper than he has done for some time, while Joe Hart made a crucial save to stop Dynamo from levelling at 2-2.

Those five players have been the bedrock of City’s successes, and this was just the second time since August that they have all played together. “Those players are like the spine of the team,” Pablo Zabaleta said before the Dynamo game. “Vinny has been out for long periods, and Silva, and we lost Aguero with a bad injury. You need your best players in their best form if you are going to be a strong team.”

When Kompany spoke after the match it was with a sense that professional pride, which there has not been enough of this year, was back within the group. “It was a good performance all round from the team, everyone worked their socks off,” Kompany said. “The main thing is that when you do a good job you get a lot of satisfaction out of it, and you want to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible. The only way for us to do it is to carry on doing the same thing we did today, whether it’s against Liverpool or any other team from now until the end of the season.”

But when Manchester City play this well, there is only one question worth asking: why can’t they perform at their top level every week? If they could find the same intensity and consistency managed by Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City, those two teams would not be in the title race because City would already have it sewn up.

But in the real world, Spurs have taken six points off City this season, and Leicester have taken four. So City are sat in fourth in the league, six points off the pace.

These City players, though, have won the league twice before from worse positions than this. Kompany, describing the prospect of the second leg, did not need to finish his sentence after saying “if we play like we did today...” But that applies to far more than just the return match at the Etihad Stadium on 15 March. If City do play like they did in Kiev for the rest of the season, then all the possible prizes suddenly come back into play, starting on Sunday.