sport news Huddersfield 0-3 Manchester City: Danilo, Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane strike

It is at this stage of the season that the really good teams manage to win games while playing within themselves. One of the many remarkable things about Manchester City is that they can do this and still score three goals.

It sounds strange, but this was as modest a performance we have seen from City and that includes the occasional game they have lost. For the first 45 minutes, Pep Guardiola’s team were poor, giving the ball away, making bad decisions and strangely low on tempo and rhythm.

Nevertheless, the game was over by the hour. This said much about Huddersfield, a team that will be down by Easter unless the replacement for the departed David Wagner manages to find the belief, enthusiasm and energy that was so miserably lacking here. It said more about City, though.

It is Guardiola’s team that has steadily sucked the optimism and courage out of the majority of Premier League opponents over the last two seasons. It is City that arrive at so many grounds to find the job half done before they even step off the coach.

That helps on days like this, days when standards slip. It helps to still score three goals and threaten more. It helps to keep City in the slipstream of Liverpool ahead of a title race denouement that surely will take us all the way to the final weeks.

Liverpool remain favourites because they have a points advantage. However, it is not unfeasible that City would win every game between now and the season’s end. They are the one team in the country capable of doing that and days like this only underline just how much quality they do have. Liverpool really should not rest easy.

Here there was no Silva – Bernardo or David – in the City line-up and no Riyad Mahrez in the squad at all. Phil Foden, meanwhile, stayed on the bench throughout.

Still, though, they were more than good enough to score early through Danilo’s deflected shot and then take the game away from Huddersfield on the back of a brief but effective increase in tempo and energy in the second half that brought them goals for Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane.

Early in the game City – dressed in their horribly hallucinogenic away kit - were slow and ponderous. Luckily for them, Huddersfield were so passive as to be almost stationary.

We have all heard the arguments about the best way to play Guardiola’s team, if indeed there is one. If you press them, they will play through you and embarrass you. If you sit off them, you will almost certainly lose but perhaps not by as many.

Here Huddersfield, minus the manager who did so much for them over three years, opted for the latter approach. It was understandable but at the same time not particularly well executed. If you play this way then there still has to be some intensity, some snap in the tackle, some hustle and a willingness to break forward with

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