Update: Man City are quietly doing what their dressing room doubted they could News

Manchester City are within touching distance of the Champions League after finally discovering a formula to win games after months of struggles.

Even when Manchester City started dropping points in the autumn and Liverpool began to pull away in the Premier League, the belief was still there in the Etihad Stadium dressing room.

“In the end we always won the title and I don’t think it’s going to be different this year,” said Manu Akanji after a bad-tempered draw with Arsenal that saw the City squad accuse their rivals of dark arts in a showdown that feels a lifetime ago.

“Like I said it’s still early in the season, I think again, we’re going to win the league again, and we don’t focus too much on Arsenal,” continued Akanji. Neither City nor Arsenal have come close to winning the title and Liverpool will almost certainly end the Blues’ four-year status as champions on Sunday.

But City are quietly ending the season strongly. When the injuries piled up in October, November and December and they were losing game after game, there was always the expectancy that form would turn around. Because that’s how City always do things.

They make life difficult for themselves in the winter months, have a team meeting or two to air some home truths, and then put together a winning run that sees them come back from the brink and back into title contention.

This season, though, that moment never came. As Christmas approached, more injuries piled up and Pep Guardiola was openly admitting that his side were ‘fragile’. He accepted that the rebuild planned for this summer should have happened last summer and £180m was spent ahead of schedule in January. The run that the dressing room was waiting for never came so the club took drastic action.

“We are not able to win games, as a team always we found a way to win games,” Guardiola bemoaned after the season’s key moment in November against Feyenoord. City have lost plenty of awful games this season but the 15 minute collapse in the Champions League from 3-0 up was the turning point in Europe. City were set for a morale-boosting win that could have sparked a revival, only to condemn themselves to more misery.

Guardiola added that night: “We are a team who concede few, few goals over these eight or nine years. Now it is not going to happen. We cannot close the games.” It was the same game where Guardiola made headlines for scratches on his face such was the crisis unfolding before his eyes.

Speaking to players after these games, the frustration was clear. Just like Guardiola, they didn’t have an answer to what was going on. All they had was a return to the tried-and-tested formula – take one game at a time and try to put one of those winning runs together. Yet there was an acceptance that such a run must be earned.

As long as the mistakes kept coming, that run would have to wait. The title was conceded early and City were out of Europe before the knockout stages. Now, though, with more time between games and returning players in attack, the Blues have quietly put a couple of decent runs together and are within touching distance of a Champions League place next season.

There was a mini revival after Christmas but there were familiar collapses at Brentford and Paris Saint-Germain followed by a humbling at Arsenal and the Real Madrid fiascos. Liverpool didn’t break sweat in their win at the Etihad to leave City back at square one – yet since that game Guardiola’s men might have turned a corner.

A hard-fought win at Tottenham, a couple of FA Cup victories and a solitary defeat at Nottingham Forest (which could have easily gone either way), has seen City lose just once in their last 10, winning five of their last six. They are second in the 15-game form table in the Premier League and into the FA Cup semi-finals.

They lost late at Forest but also turned tight games against Everton and Aston Villa into valuable wins. They came back against Crystal Palace and were professional against Leicester. Even at Manchester United, the old-guard that Guardiola has settled on to get these results took a point that looks better now than it felt at the time. Other unlikely heroes in Nico O’Reilly and Matheus Nunes are stepping up too rather than letting others take the lead.

It all comes down to confidence. Hearing the players speak throughout the season and each result game with a clear desire to get back into the next game and put things right. One win, they felt, would restore a bit more confidence each time and slowly but surely a run would come. It hasn’t been the prettiest run and won’t be remembered after this season, but it has been one of the most important 10-game periods in City’s recent history.

It has been too late to mount a title challenge that never got going, however City are doing what they so often do at this time of year: forget what has happened, focus on each game as it comes, and chase down their goal. If this is how the old guard go out, they are doing it the same way they always have.