Manchester City steamroll Watford in an FA Cup final almost entirely devoid of competitive tension

Manchester City tried to wrap themselves in their past this afternoon, warming up in kits modelled on the FA Cup winners of 1969, but the way they won here was unrecognisable from any Cup win in recent history.

This was an unprecedentedly one-sided final, in which City took Watford apart with all the precision and focus that they have brought to almost every game they have played over the last two years. No-one is surprised by this any more: City have taken 198 points and scored 201 goals in the last two league seasons put together. Today completed a historic domestic treble. Quadruple if you include the Community Shield too.

But finals are meant to feel different. And this just felt as if a routine home win at the Etihad had for some reason been relocated to Wembley for the day. It was a game almost entirely devoid of competitive tension, and after from the moment when Abdoulaye Doucoure’s shot hit Vincent Kompany’s arm in the first half, a result like this always felt hoveringly inevitable.

And that is not what finals are all about. There have been one-sided finals in the past – like when Arsenal beat Aston Villa 4-0 in 2015. But that was a mediocre Arsenal team against Tim Sherwood’s Villa, and even then it was tight before the goals went in. This game was just a rout. Unlike any other final in the Cup’s recent past.

This is the break in history that this team and this Pep Guardiola era represents. Of course other teams have dominated before, but not quite like this. Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United towered over their era but even in the treble season they only won 79 points. They could not go into every game with that sense of inevitability behind them. Even their greatest triumphs felt more unlikely, and more compelling for it.

This is why what City are doing right now is different from the wins of the past. Tony Book was here to carry the trophy out at the start, and Mike Summerbee was here as a TV pundit. That was a great Cup-winning City team under Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison, and they had won the league the previous season too. But Book and Mercer never knew total superiority like this. In 1968-69, when they beat Leicester City in the Wembley final, City finished 13th in the league. Winning 15 of their 42 games.

Even City’s recent history looks unrecognisable from this vantage point. Compare this with Manchester City’s first FA Cup win of the Abu Dhabi era. When City won the Cup in 2011 it had all the feeling and tension of a genuinely unlikely sporting achievement. Yes City had good players then – David Silva, Vincent Kompany, Carlos Tevez, Joe Hart – but they had done nothing as a group, never won anything, never challenged for a major trophy. They were totally unproven as a serious team.

So when City came here to play Manchester United in the FA Cup semi-final in April 2011, they came as underdogs. They were up against Sir Alex Ferguson’s United, a team who won the Premier League that season and lost the Champions League final here to Barcelona. A team that did not have Cristiano Ronaldo anymore but did have Wayne Rooney, not far from his peak, as well as Edwin van der Sar, Patrice Evra, Paul Scholes, and Nani in the form of his life.

But City won that game. Yaya Toure scored the only goal and when the players ‘did the Poznan’ on the pitch with Roberto Mancini afterwards, it was because they sensed that this was a transformative moment in the history of the club. The day when they tore up what had been expected of them. And for the first time threaten to make their spending count.

Ask any City fan about the most important games of the last decade and that semi-final win in 2011 will be close to the top, right up there with the Sergio Aguero QPR game one year later.

And when City came back to Wembley to complete the job against Stoke City, they did so in an atmosphere of stifling pressure and tension. They had to wait and wait and wait for Toure’s winner, the only goal of the game. There was a constant feeling that they were right on the brink of throwing it all away, that their progress was still fragile.

Contrast that from today, as City gleefully ran in the second half goals against a side who were utterly powerless to resist. By the end even John Stones was running through on goal. The last time there was this little pressure and tension here in a game it was the Wayne Rooney Foundation International.

If City had wanted to score 10 or 12 they could have done. Those two finals, today and 2011, might have both ended in blue ribbons but compare the two and they look like night and day. Never mind Neil Young and 1969. All four domestic trophies and 98 points in the league. This is a new standard of football, of consistency and of winning inevitability. But is it how finals are meant to feel?