De Zerbi, Carrick and others who can thank Man City for dominating the interlull discourse

We’re almost there. It’s almost over. You can almost taste that foaming mug of Barclays on your lips.

The longest interlull in history has only 48 hours left to run. Congratulations, everyone, we made it.

But how did we make it? Because, obviously, of Manchester City. Hats off to the great big cheating b**tards, frankly. We quite literally couldn’t have done it without you.

It’s not just as and the rest of the media enormously relieved that this absolutely massive story fell from space at the most convenient possible time by complete and total coincidence.

No. There are a great many Premier League sorts who might feel enormously grateful that the international break spotlight fell so entirely and glaringly on Man City and let some more workaday chancers – whose crimes amount to nothing more serious at the end of the day than not doing the football very well in one way or another – to get through what promised to be three awkward weeks incredibly lightly.

Here are just five such people, and by a further stroke of serendipitous good fortune, there’s one from each of the other members of the increasingly ragged Big Six. Oh frabjous day.

Roberto De Zerbi Obviously him. We’d say the Man City verdict is his best result of the season, only that would sound like we were taking the p*ss. But even if his actual results had been slightly less abysmally rotten than they are, the Man City verdict would still have been his best one.

Despite all the praise that headed Spurs’ way in the summer for Doing Their Business Early, and they really did do some eye-catching business early, they also did some classic Levy-tribute Doing Their Business Late that meant they started the season almost entirely unready. So unready, in fact, that they were actually less ready than teams like Newcastle who they themselves had been actively involved in unreadying.

Spurs had no excuse for being unready. Yet there they were. Unready, unwilling, unthinking, stumbling from one disastrous matchday to the next. They’ve somehow looked even worse than Thomas Frank’s team, and that team had essentially by the end been a hate letter to the entire concept of watchable football.

Spurs and De Zerbi have spent the five months since avoiding relegation by the skin of their arse desperately second-guessing themselves. They’ve tried to spend like a big club. They’ve become so scared of another injury crisis that they basically gave up pre-season, carefully managed absolutely everyone’s minutes, missed the chance to hit the ground running, and still ended up with an injury crisis anyway, one almost self-fulfilled into existence and now worsened with the loss of both their starting centre-backs during the break.

But what De Zerbi has had is three relatively quiet weeks to have a mini-pre-season with the players who weren’t on international duty. And the good news for Spurs is that they are both so very sh*t and so very injury-ravaged that this actually represented a reasonable number of players.

He was always going to get those three weeks – there was no real prospect of Spurs binning him just yet – but he couldn’t possibly have dreamt he’d get them without a hint of outside botherment and noise. It’s an absolute result. And just imagine if over these last few weeks he’s actually managed to turn Savio, Mohammed Kudus and Dominic Solanke into a semi-functional Premier League attack.

Sure, it’s a wild and optimistic dream, but if he’s pulled that off then there’s no reason why Spurs can’t aim as high as another 17th-placed finish. Audere Est Facere, echoes of glory, and all that.

Michael Carrick There are a couple of obvious managers who will be thrilled about Man City’s travails for the short-term attention shift. Especially De Zerbi, but especially Carrick. It had all been starting to get too much for him there.

Being Man United manager properly, with lots of games and no easy wins from simply correcting the previous fool’s most obvious mistakes, has unsurprisingly proved harder for Carrick than last season’s demo-mode version of the job.

A bit of time between games, like he enjoyed in the second half of the season, might have been just the ticket anyway, but like De Zerbi he couldn’t have possibly imagined he’d also have that time without any real outside noise about him at all.

Essentially, we’re now barely two days out from a full-blown Sackico clash between Manchester United and Spurs, yet that game barely figures in the public conscience at all.

On another timeline, we’d all have been talking about little else since this time last week. As it is, it feels like people are only actually going to remember it’s happening at about 5pm on Saturday.

Florian Wirtz Would, we imagine, have been looking forward to the international break anyway. The chance to go off and play for Germany, under Jurgen Klopp, already an enticing one for a player still trying to find his way at Liverpool.

And a fine job of it he’s done too. He can return to Liverpool with a bit of confidence restored, a few wise words in his ear from a man who knows a thing or two about Anfield, and as an added bonus an upcoming occasion at that ground on Sunday where the world will be willing Liverpool on to give City a righteous thrashing.

Not us, though. It’s nothing against Liverpool, or against Wirtz who we are quite deeply invested in seeing prove just how good we’re sure he definitely is. But we’ve very much decided that what we want to see happen for the next few months is for City to continue flattening all-comers and staying top of the league in order to turn the whole Premier League season into a, for want of a better word, sham.

It is the bleakest and yet funniest possibility, and does feel very much like the one the Premier League deserve, because they’ve just been a bit too pleased with themselves over the last fortnight for a league that needed a rogue hacker to identify one of the biggest bits of cheating ever known in elite sport, and also still haven’t actually done anything about it beyond tell everyone how cross they are about it all but also how pleased with themselves.

The league simply don’t deserve City to kind of just fall away. The elephant must remain top of the table.

Viktor Gyokeres And it’s unlikely, of course, to be Liverpool who topple them. Much more likely that’s going to be our old friends Arsenal who, again, have been able to spend the last few weeks avoiding detection despite going into the break on the back of a fearful and momentum-halting defeat at Brighton.

In the City-dominated landscape, Gyokeres is another who has been able to quietly go about playing some actual football with a clear head and outside the harshest glare that could have been coming his way.

He’s played vastly more football in the last couple of weeks than he had all season with Arsenal, where half his competitive minutes are accounted for by a single Carabao clash with Ipswich. He’s played all or most of each of Sweden’s four games, scoring in every single one of them like an Ikea Gerd Muller, and only very, very occasionally having to be reminded that he is in fact a great big useless waste of money who plays the game like a kid.

Xabi Alonso Look, he wasn’t the first relatively new manager of a big London club to go and get a 3-0 paddling at Brentford this season.

But you really don’t want to find yourself in any Premier League situation right now where your chief defence is “Well Spurs did it.” That’s a cry for help.

Chelsea were supposed to be different this season. They’d spent loads of money again, sure, but after appointing a football manager instead of a pitiful LinkedIn guff-spouting yes man, they’d also spent some of that money in a way that appeared to at least display some interest in constructing a viable football team and not just a portfolio of valuable assets to be cashed in for a tidy profit at a later date.

But they’ve been unavoidably and unerringly Modern Chelsea so far. A couple of impressive wins to start, where the dizzying attacking play masked all manner of defensive frailties, followed by games where that attacking play has not masked all manner of defensive frailties.

They hit the international break on a run of one point from three games, with that point being from a home draw against Hull.

Xabi Alonso should already have been enormously grateful for the attention-diverting efforts of Carrick and De Zerbi even before the revelation that City had been doing their cheating with their c*cks so very far entirely out that even Chelsea – Chelsea! – had a tiny little space available to them atop the moral high ground.