Only three hat-tricks have ever been scored against teams managed by Pep Guardiola – and Jamie Vardy now has two of them.
Lionel Messi scored the other and, had the summer and the season panned out differently, this match would have been his home debut for Manchester City, before a besotted and raucous full house. Instead, an echoing Etihad played host to a club legend of a wholly different variety – Vardy, whose career has been spent on a trajectory that could not be more different to one lived in the Nou Camp.
What a player he is, though – and what a knotty little problem for Manchester City, always running, always twisting, always turning, fast and quick-witted and seemingly impossible to contain.