For Enzo Maresca, relief finally came 13 minutes into a quarter of an hour press conference when someone asked a routine question about Erling Haaland’s fitness.
‘Ah, finally,’ the coach of Manchester City smiled.
It was the first and only question of the day that had anything to do with the actual football. And this – with City now living some weird post-115 version of reality – is how it will be for the foreseeable future.
Maresca played his role of ‘football guy’ as well as could have been expected as he sat behind a desk on a raised platform at City’s training ground yesterday morning. The bullet points did not make for headlines.
I am fine, the players are fine. I trust the club.
If Maresca’s team carry any such composure into the Anfield boiling pot on Sunday afternoon then they may handle what comes with a little more deftness than many anticipate or indeed would like.
Enzo Maresca delivered an assured performance when faced with questions about the verdict
But the City manager’s problem is not just about Anfield. It’s about a bigger picture, the one that will see the matter of his club’s guilty verdict in their fight with the Premier League follow him and his team all the way through the season until the result of City’s appeal is known.
Sunday’s clash with Liverpool on Merseyside feels like perhaps no other game in Premier League history.
The day in 2012 that Liverpool’s Luis Suarez faced Manchester United’s Patrice Evra at Old Trafford after being accused of a racial slur in a previous meeting was unforgettable. Suarez is still waiting for his pre-match handshake.
But that was about individuals. This one is about a club and an alleged culture of systemic cheating. It is about collective values, integrity and fairness and as such cuts to the heart of what sport should always fundamentally be about.
And yes, it will be deeply personal too.
The modern Liverpool-City rivalry has been desperately unpleasant at times. Some time-served City fans stopped going to Anfield some time ago, citing a level of hostility not witnessed at any other stadium.
So City will travel west on Sunday morning with their guts churning at the thought that Liverpool now have an opportunity to occupy a moral high ground. This at a place where their staff and players say they have not always felt safe, a place at which complaints have previously been made about incidents on the way to the stadium and indeed behind the away dugout.
‘I really wouldn’t want to be on that City bus,’ says a source previously close to match day arrangements involving these clubs.
Still, though, this does not represent the peak of the mountain for Maresca’s team. In terms of what lies ahead, they are only in the foothills.
Enzo Maresca insisted he would have still joined Man City had they been found guilty of financial breaches prior to him being offered the role
Maresca spoke with insight yesterday about footballers and how their minds work.
‘They are 20, 25 years old,’ he said.
‘They come here, they enjoy their training sessions, they go home happy. They are top of the league, so they are relaxed.
‘Look at Enzo Fernandez. In Argentina it’s almost every game is like going to Anfield, so no problem.
‘They are just thinking how they can beat Liverpool. We are going to try.’
Maresca is right, up until a point. It’s true that we often afford the average Premier League footballer a breadth of emotional intelligence that deeply encompasses the deeper issues of the game when in truth the ‘eat, sleep, play, repeat’ model is closer to the truth.
Equally, few of them are stupid. The Premier League is stressful and the season is long. It is emotionally and physically taxing. How well, then, do we really think City players will cope in the long term with the unmistakably surreal nature of their new predicament?
How, for example, would a three-point lead at the top of the Premier League feel at Christmas if there remained enormous doubt about whether City will even be a top-flight club next season?
How does a team even begin to conduct a title race against that kind of backdrop? A siege mentality can be helpful but even that will only take a group of players so far.
Maresca was comfortable under questioning on Friday morning. He was graceful. But this will be no single rodeo. This is the way it will be from now on. Wherever City play and whatever the result.
Next Wednesday, City face the reigning European champions PSG at the Etihad. UEFA have a long fight with City in their memory bank too. Across town at Old Trafford, meanwhile, that famous banner celebrating their neighbours having gone 35 years without a trophy – taken down when City broke through in 2011 – is going back up again. The implication is clear – none of it has counted.
And this is how ground continues to move under City’s feet. Nothing now feels as it did.
At the club the mood remains tense but bullish. City feel the Premier League’s motives to be unfair and pre-meditated and the judgment of the commission it appointed to hear their case to be unsound.
They are confident an appeal judge will view the evidence they provided with more objectivity. This is the principle and the argument that has been outlined internally to Maresca, a coach who is in his third spell working at the club.
His predecessor Pep Guardiola – for whom he worked in the treble season of 2022-23 – would perhaps have been rather front-footed on Friday. Guardiola has sat on that same podium before and railed against the perceived motives of the rival Premier League clubs City have always felt resented their smashing of a glass ceiling traditionally tinted red.
But Guardiola has lived this fight and this City era in a way Maresca has not. The younger man’s two spells amount to less than two whole years between them. From this point of view, this is not Maresca’s scrap but he has been thrown into the middle of it nonetheless.
The rank and file City supporters will continue to back their club. What choice do they really have? Others associated with the club have started to waver.
Maresca threw his backing behind the club’s ownership and chief executive Ferran Soriano, right, and vowed to speak openly ‘when we win the appeal’
As one high-profile former City executive said privately this week: ‘The sooner the club holds its hands up, the sooner we can move on and start again. We all want a City we can be proud of.’
Pride – and maybe even some hubris – will be on show in and around Liverpool on Sunday. City have long resented what they view as Liverpool’s self-satisfied view of themselves and as such their resilience – on and off the field – will be examined this weekend.
Comments from former players such as Kyle Walker and Vincent Kompany this week have not been without merit. With 25 City trophies between them, they will always feel they prevailed where it mattered. This is a saga as unfair on them as it is on those who paid to watch. But the threat to City’s standing, reputation and long-term feeling of self-worth is real.
Guardiola once described Anfield as a ‘bugger of a ground’. It was, in his decade in England, the one place that vexed, frustrated and tortured him like no other.
Maresca will feel some of that and more this weekend. This already feels like an event of almost unprecedented complexity and depth.
But the problem for City and their manager is that when it’s over, the rest of this inevitably uncomfortable season – indeed the rest of a sporting lifetime that will forever feel different – is only just beginning.
