For so long, the talking point of the season was whether Arsenal really could win a quadruple. Then they lost the Carabao Cup final to Manchester City and an FA Cup quarter-final to Southampton – “enjoy your quadruple, pal” – in the space of a few days.
So a few weeks later, as City prepare to meet Southampton at Wembley on Saturday, perhaps the most intriguing question now is whether Pep Guardiola’s side can win a third treble of his reign, a treble bid which has snuck up on the blindside and caught us by surprise.
OK, it is not quite the treble of Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup which City won in 2023. But winning the league, FA Cup and Carabao Cup would replicate their feat of 2019 and add an unexpected layer to Guardiola’s legacy, in what may turn out to be his final season at the Etihad Stadium.
Because City have not looked like a trophy-winning side for much of this season. They started November eighth in the league, nine points behind Arsenal. They scraped into the top eight of the Champions League standings.
But as is often the case, mid-season, Guardiola has landed on the right blend of players in a system that is proving hard to beat. Since they were knocked out of the Champions League by Real Madrid last month, City have won all five matches including two victories over Arsenal, a 3-0 win over Chelsea and a 4-0 thrashing of Liverpool.
Wednesday’s profligate 1-0 win at Burnley was perhaps a reminder that City are nothing like Guardiola’s previous treble-winning sides, and maybe that is what would make this season’s successes all the more remarkable, for what is an unremarkable team. Victory sent them top of the league for the first time all season, and now attention shifts to Wembley.
Standing in their way on Saturday are the country’s in-form team. Southampton are unbeaten in their past 20 games in all competitions, a run stretching back to mid-January. Their form under 33-year-old manager Tonda Eckert has helped propel them from relegation trouble when he took charge in November to the play-off places, and with two games left of the Championship season, Saints still retain a slim chance of automatic promotion.
The Premier League may be the ultimate goal this season but the FA Cup holds a sentimental place in Southampton hearts, 50 years on from Bobby Stokes’ winning goal in the final which delivered the only major trophy in the club’s long history. Eckert would go down in Saints folklore if he could sink Arsenal and City on the way to lifting the trophy half a century later.
The young German coach was working in the club’s academy when manager Will Still was sacked, and initially took over as interim manager. At one stage Southampton appeared to be going the same way as Leicester, straight down from the Premier League to League One, as if their parachute had been sabotaged. But Eckert has worked wonders.
In many ways he is the opposite of Guardiola, who won every trophy in his playing career, not coaching until he was 36. Eckert has barely kicked a ball. He played Under-15 football with Antonio Rudiger and joined Hertha Berlin’s academy, but recently told the Guardian he pursued coaching because “I was intelligent enough to realise that I was not good enough” to make it as a professional player.
He began his coaching journey aged 19, as a university student, working as an analyst for the German national team during Euro 2012, and later joined the academies of FC Koln, RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich, where he missed working with Guardiola by a couple of years.
“It’s an honour for me to stand on the sideline next to him,” Eckert said this week. “It’s a big stadium, obviously, but I don’t go there for the experience, I don’t go there as a spectator, we go there to challenge.”
How can Southampton possibly stop Guardiola’s City juggernaut? Eckert was open enough to elaborate on that problem. Dogged defending will be crucial, but that alone will not carry Southampton to the final.
“We will have some periods where you need to suffer, but accept at the same time that you might not touch the ball for a minute and just stay calm,” the manager said. “If you see where City scores their goals, most of them are within the width of the six-yard box, and most of them are inside the 18-yard box. There might be some moments where you just need to defend inside your box and be very clear on how to do that.
“And then there will be more than enough chances, we’re definitely going to have a couple of transition moments. We need to be crucial on the ones that they give to us, because it’s not going to be too many. I think you can’t rely only on defending in these games.
“We need to be brave enough and find another gear and the energy that when we do have the ball, we have spurts of play in possession. I think that we found quite a good combination of both of these aspects against Arsenal and that will be the key again on Saturday.”
City will be favourites to progress but Guardiola has a strange relationship with the FA Cup. On the one hand, this is a record eighth consecutive Cup semi-final for City, who are aiming to become the first side ever to reach four consecutive finals. But Guardiola has lost six of his seven FA Cup games at Wembley, and defeats by Manchester United and Crystal Palace in the past two finals were chastening.
Guardiola has won six Premier Leagues and five League Cups but has lifted the FA Cup only twice, a relatively low return in a decade of dominance. It is perhaps the only unfulfilled shelf in his overflowing trophy cabinet, and so this cup run has a little added significance beyond City’s treble pursuit.
And yet for Southampton, it means even more. “You can feel around the club for many, many weeks and months now that this year is very special,” said Eckert. “The competition itself is obviously always special, but now being the 50th anniversary of when we last won it, even more so.”
