Manchester City packed the squad onto a coach after losing the Community Shield. They are training on a ridge because the papers said they had a mountain to climb. The Premier League can wait.
The last crate of orange slices sat unopened by the dressing-room door on Tuesday. Staff stacked the cones and locked the gym. Nobody stayed to use them.
Manchester City will not train at home this week. The first team boarded a coach at dawn and drove north. They are camping on a ridge because writers said they had a mountain to climb.
Roddy Halsall, hired overnight as director of vertical ambition, met them in a gravel car park. He issued rucksacks, maps and nineteen numbered bibs. He told the players the Shield loss was a war already lost on flat grass.
We do not come down until the legs understand the brief.
The briefing had the tone coaches use after a final. Halsall said Arsenal had held the line and City would hold the slope.
The Community Shield is a pre-season handshake in August. City staff described broken supply lines to the forwards and a collapse in midfield. They treated the afternoon like a campaign that had already ended.
One Sky report framed the defeat as the scale of the job ahead. City booked the trail the same night. The Premier League list went into a side pocket, unread.
Writers at ESPN reached for the same height after Arsenal's display. Halsall kept a printout in his coat. He said the words were a route card.
Tamsin Crowe walked the first switchback with a stopwatch and a radio. She logged nineteen minutes to the stone cairn. She called the climb a barnstorming answer to a flat display in London.
Arsenal, she said, had shown a steel-nerved press for ninety minutes. City would answer with thin air. Crowe refused to rank the league among the week's tasks.
Local ranger Derek Pym watched from a stile as the line of bibs moved up. The squad asked him for a steeper path after the first rest. Pym has led school groups. He has not led a club that just dropped a Shield.
A shorter loop sat on his map. The captains shook their heads. They wanted the long face of the hill and they wanted it now.
Halsall would not say when they might come down. He pointed at cloud sliding over the next ridge. He said the only score that counts now is the one against the hill.
