Throughout this game, Pep Guardiola patrolled his technical area in a thick, padded, hooded winter coat, hunched against a moderate March chill. A few yards to his right Plymouth’s Miron Muslic seemed to be radiating his own warmth, wearing a flimsy gilet over a thin, cream sweater. The point being, even Muslic’s clothing was optimistic, a refusal to submit to the obvious and unavoidable. And so too his team, for all that in the end they could not quite outrun it.
For a while it felt as if Plymouth were controlling the game, inasmuch as it is possible to do so while enjoying 25% of possession, being 39 league places below your opponents and demonstrably worse than them in almost every...
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