In total, the lead has changed hands 26 times, once roughly every 10 days on average. Arsenal and Liverpool have each had seven different spells on top. Chelsea have led the way on five occasions and, if we go back to the opening weekend, even Manchester United had a couple of days looking down on everybody else. "Next year I guarantee we will be No1 in Manchester," Sir Bobby Charlton said at their player-of-the-year dinner on Thursday. And no doubt they will keep you to that, Bobby, on the other side of Mancunian Way.
There is an irony that Manchester City should be saddled with their noisy neighbours' tag when the bold promises and easy soundbites are generally heard from the direction of Old Trafford these days. At City, the chief executive, Ferran Soriano, has not granted a single interview all season. The director of football, Txiki Begiristain, has been equally elusive and there are glaciers in Antarctica that move with greater speed than Manuel Pellegrini's press conferences.
Garry Cook brought a bellyful of bravado and a thesaurus of slick-speak and Roberto Mancini referred to colleagues by surname only. The new regime have returned City to the top of English football with an appreciation, perhaps for the first time, of how a big club should operate, and that it is possible to turn down the volume amid the sound and fury, and frequent nonsense, elsewhere. Noisy? We have barely heard a peep out of City all season.
They have done it assuredly and with distinction and, if it is not too presumptuous to think they should complete their work against West Ham on Sunday, they could probably be forgiven for thinking it warrants more acclaim than they have actually received bearing in mind the acres of newsprint devoted to Liverpool's renaissance, Manchester United's various crises and the wild graph of José Mourinho's first season back at Chelsea.
Pellegrini's reluctance to embrace questions has moved City to the edges of the news agenda when Mourinho, in his sourest moments, has seemed incapable of seeing a belt without hitting below it. Liverpool have delivered the season's most riveting narrative whereas the post-Ferguson United have still been possibly the biggest headline act, just not in a way they could ever have imagined. Tottenham have attracted their own rubberneckers and Arsenal's long stretch at the top always had the feel of a deception. The truth, unfortunately for Arsène Wenger, is they were merely keeping the position warm for a team with greater powers of endurance. That team, on the verge of their second title in three seasons, should really consider this as the opportunity to cement a position as England's dominant club for the foreseeable future.
Just to avoid any doubt, a disclaimer should be inserted at this point to remind everyone that this is still City, on the anniversary of losing to Wigan Athletic in the FA Cup final, and there are good reasons, historically, why their supporters have not tempted fate by taking on the cries of "we're going to win the league" that have been heard wherever Liverpool have played in recent months.
Everyone remembers Sergio Agüero wheeling away in the sunlight, twirling his shirt, two seasons ago, and the euphoric story that is now depicted in a series of 20ft-high pictures stretching round the Etihad Stadium walls. Yet there are other memories that day of supporters heading for the exits, eyes down, in deep shock, stumbling away like zombies, as the game entered stoppage time with QPR winning, not wanting to see any more. Many had made it the full length of Joe Mercer Way before the roars lured them back. There is maybe no other club in the world that puts their followers through the mill quite like this one.
Realistically, though, West Ham should be relatively obliging opponents now City have stopped playing catch-up and are leading from the front. It is their sixth spell at the top this season and it is certainly unorthodox that the current one – and it has been only since Wednesday – constitutes their longest period at the summit all season. Arsenal have spent 128 days at the front, Chelsea 64 and Liverpool 59. City have managed 15 in total but they have certainly been persistent and Charlton's preview of how next season will pan out – "We like to be first and we will be first" – sounds suspiciously like the kind of Cook-esque statement that compelled Sir Alex Ferguson, in happier times, to come up with the noisy-neighbour tag.
Perhaps Charlton is making the same mistake as some of City's own supporters and still half-expecting the old City to put in a reappearance, tripping over the cobblestones and doing their best to be known as football's Slapstick XI. The club, lest it be forgotten, where the King of the Kippax fanzine used to run a spoof advertisement marketing the team as a cure for low blood pressure – "as proven over the last 30 years" – and there was so little to celebrate the shop used to sell a video commemorating four successive away wins, at West Ham, Notts County, Spurs and Southampton from the 1991-92 season and bonus footage of "the game at Luton when City came close to making it five". Just not that close. City actually trailed twice and Steve Redmond was sent off before coming away with a 2-2 draw. But who wants to be pedantic?
A new breed of City supporters will grow up never fully realising just what it was like in those days but they really ought to get hold of a copy of Blue Moon: Down Among the Dead Men‚ Mark Hodkinson's account of City's 1998-99 season in what is now League One, and contrast the stories back then with what they are experiencing now.
One goes back to the club's AGM and the kind of outburst that was common at the time. A young man in the public seats, speaking very quickly, without a pause for breath, and almost screaming by the end, as the panel of directors froze in horror: "I'm sick of my dad and his mates going on about Colin Bell and Francis Lee and all that lot. It all happened years ago. I'm 24 and all my life I've been fed … shit! Twenty years of shit!"
Another recounts the story of Alan Kernaghan leaving Maine Road, the place Hodkinson depicts as "the mausoleum of moans and groans" to join St Johnstone and explaining how he felt about getting away. "Four years of my prime were completely wasted at City," he said. "I still follow their results though, with a snigger."
These days, the words "typical"and "City" mean something very different. Pellegrini's team have scored three goals or more on 30 different occasions, and four or more 16 times. Charlton played in the United side, managed by Matt Busby, that amassed 143 goals in the 1956-57 season, a record that had stood for 57 years until Pellegrini's team obliterated it, with 154 and counting. In the Premier League, 100 have been scored and 33 conceded. City's goal difference column is the same, 63, as United's goals-scored column. It is not just a gap that has opened up between the two Manchester teams; it is threatening to become a gulf.
A year ago, the Cup final was played to the soundtrack of "You can stick your Pellegrini up your arse", and City's supporters in front of the Wembley press box tried to tell its inhabitants Mancini was going nowhere. Now Pellegrini is honoured in a banner, "This Charming Man", that has taken its lead from the Smiths song, and it is intriguing, once again, that City are on the verge of winning a league without any apparent chance of the man who has guided them to that position winning manager of the year.
Two years ago, Alan Pardew was recognised for taking Newcastle to fifth. This year, it seems to be between Tony Pulis and Brendan Rodgers (both deserved winners) when the League Managers Association holds its dinner at Old Billingsgate on Monday. Mancini, in private, let it be known he thought it was an outrage. Pellegrini, in his quiet, understated way, will smile politely, and say nothing.
Unfortunate Dyke and Clarke should really have curbed their enthusiasm
There is an old episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Cheryl is on a plane going through severe turbulence and, fearing the worst, manages to ring Larry to tell him she loves him, just in case. The problem is Larry isn't listening. "You couldn't have rung at a worse time," he explains. His television set is playing up, the Lakers are on, and the TiVo guy is trying to show him the problem. "Ring me back in 10 minutes," he says.
Greg Dyke seems to be operating with the same kind of selective hearing. In one ear, there are a few misguided people telling him it would be good for English football to take a sledgehammer to the lower leagues. In the other ear, the rest of the football community tries to get in a few words and the shutters come down. It is no wonder the idea of a B team league is in danger of dying of loneliness.
Greg Clarke, chairman of the Football League, seems awfully confused, too, bearing in mind he was part of the commission that came up with this plan only for his own organisation to put out a statement during the launch describing it as unacceptable. Clarke has a habit of blurred priorities if you remember he was "savagely angry" when Coventry City's owners relocated the club to Northampton at the start of the season. He understood why Coventry's fans were "outraged" and, if he were one of them, he would be "incandescent". Even though he had waved it through himself when there were rules in place that could easily have prevented it.
Clarke and his colleagues have just awarded Coventry one of their Family Excellence Awards, recognising the "outstanding experience provided for young fans and families".
Forgive me for being cynical, but maybe someone could kindly explain how playing 35 miles away, among disenchanted crowds, in the wrong ground, in the wrong town, is a good thing for the mums and dads and kids of Coventry?
