City Watch: Blues prepare for another Wembley trip

With the title race now edging towards a conclusion, every game is feeling like a final, and after Manchester City drew to Everton away from home last week with Arsenal picking up three points, time is running out for slip ups in North London.

With the Blues five points behind Arsenal and a game in hand to play heading into the weekend, London side Brentford made the trip to Manchester in another must win clash. 

City aren’t just relying on their own performances turning into wins now, we need the Gunners to slip up somewhere in their last three fixtures.

As for Pep and his players, they just have one objective for their final games; win them all and score as many as possible in the hope the title race goes down to goal difference. 

In the first half against the Bees, we did exactly the opposite of that.

Having beaten Keith Andrews’ side at the Gtech back in 2025, I was quietly confident heading into the game.

However, Brentford are themselves pushing for a European spot this season, which has surprised a lot of people, given they were one of the favourites for relegation.

With the half time score sitting at 0-0, the longer that went on, the more nervous it would get. 

However, just like he did against Everton on Monday last week, Jeremy Doku stepped up and unleashed a wonderful strike from just inside the box to give City the lead. 

More crucially, Erling Haaland was the man who found a second with 15 minutes to go, and Omar Marmoush made a cameo towards the end of the game, scoring to make the scoreline 3-0 and boost our goal difference to just one behind the Gunners.

I kept the review of Saturday’s game brief for one simple reason; what happened on Sunday in the game between West Ham and Arsenal. 

In previous title races, the Irons have tripped up Mikel Arteta and his players on numerous occasions, and with Burnley and Crystal Palace left to play after, this felt like it would be the perfect opportunity to gain some ground.

Unless you live under a rock, I’m fairly confident most will have seen what happened on Sunday, but I think it’s important to talk about it. 

In summary, Arsenal won 1-0 thanks to a late Leandro Trossard goal. West Ham then equalised late on which was ruled out for a foul on David Raya.

I’ll be honest, in isolation, it’s a foul, Pablo holds Raya’s arm and stops him catching the ball from the corner. 

However, when you add the context that Arsenal have been doing this sort of thing from every single set piece this season, you have to once again question the consistency of the officiating.

Arteta has built a lot of his goal scoring power from set pieces, and part of that has been barging and pushing the goalkeeper, but suddenly, when it happens to them, it’s a foul. 

This was VAR’s biggest decision, ultimately it could decide the title, and based on what we’ve seen so far this season, they got it totally wrong.

All City can now do is win and hope, and with a game against Crystal Palace on Wednesday, and the small matter of an FA Cup final against Chelsea on Saturday, let’s hope Arsenal slip up this weekend too, against relegated Burnley.