sport news It's tiresome to listen to Pep Guardiola's moans about fatigue when he has ... trends now

There's a bit of an unknown when it comes to Peter Bankes and his affiliations. The secret is out for a few in his line of work, but Bankes is a vault. His team? He’s never let that slip, which is frightfully boring when you learn he will be in the VAR hutch for Nottingham Forest’s game with Manchester City on Sunday.

In light of Forest’s little tantrum about Stuart Attwell, and the amusing connotations of a Luton Town sleeper agent at Stockley Park, how dull to draw such a blank. That won’t generate any mutters or tweets from under the tinfoil hats within the City Ground.

What we do know is Bankes is from Merseyside and that he is a 42-year-old man who, like Attwell, is presumably quite able to resist the timeless whispers from posters on his childhood walls.

That is because he is a grown-up and an accomplished professional. And most grown-up, accomplished professionals are vaguely sensible at work, even if Forest’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, seems to be a fraction behind that curve. But we all enjoy a silly moan from time to time, which is rather the point of this discussion as we look ahead to what might be termed the moaner’s derby.

I’m a touch conflicted in my assessment of one particular thought: who out of Forest and Pep Guardiola warrants the least sympathy for silly moans this week? Or to look at it another way, who will be the last moaner standing on Sunday evening?

That feels like an easier one to get into. City losing? Unthinkable. It’s not what they do, especially when the evenings get lighter. They surge and they run off in front. Phil Foden sees the pass that bit sooner. 

Kyle Walker overlaps that much faster and whips the cross. Kevin De Bruyne even scores with his head now. When it all gets more important in the Premier League, City win until there is no more winning to be done.

They don’t stumble and fall like Liverpool did at Everton and they don’t double fault against Aston Villa like Arsenal. 

They trail in the table, which makes this title dance so wonderful, but they have the games in hand and games in hand are worth points on the board with this lot. Their success feels inevitable.

But my goodness is Guardiola a moaner. A special manager and a special kind of moaner, just like all the greats. Champions of sport, champions of style, champions of silly moaning.

And that’s the only reason for us to nurture any scintilla of a suspicion that City will lose one of their final five league games, because Guardiola has taken to dangling the possibility that his robot army might ‘fall down’ at any moment with fatigue. 

He has science on his side and common sense – we all know the attrition at this stage of the season is great. We are also well aware that the scheduling between their Real Madrid defeat and the FA Cup semi-final with Chelsea might have been kinder, not least because he got quite silly about that one, too.

But it’s about relativity and the reality that City have the strongest vehicle in a demolition derby - they were able to swap out four men for the Chelsea game and then three against Brighton, with a bench that cost £320million to assemble for the latter.