City's defeat at the City Ground is the best evidence of good governance English football has seen

I disagree.

I disagree. The consensus this weekend, assembled with unusual speed in studios, pubs and the back pages, holds that a guilty verdict followed by a defeat at the City Ground emphatic enough to prompt chants of “can we play you every week?” amounts to justice served and a dynasty in collapse. I have examined the same evidence and reached the opposite conclusion. The defeat at Nottingham Forest is not the end of the case against Manchester City. It is the beginning of the case for them.

Consider the allegation in its broadest form: a club so adept at arranging matters off the pitch that it could bend English football to its will. Very well. Then I ask the obvious question that no panel has thought to ask. Where was that power this weekend? A club genuinely capable of bending the rules would not have left Nottingham to the sound of home supporters requesting a weekly fixture. It would have arranged, at the very minimum, a draw.

According to an estimate I made this morning over a soft-boiled egg, influencing a single away fixture in the East Midlands would be a trivial undertaking for any organisation of the ingenuity alleged. I have assumed only a modest outlay: a sympathetic groundsman, a strategically mislaid set of boots, an unusually persuasive pre-match pie. That none of this appears to have occurred tells us everything we need to know.

I would go further. A defeat convincing enough to inspire that chant, the kind of loss an auditor would describe as material, is the most persuasive evidence of good governance English football has ever produced. A cheat loses narrowly and suspiciously. Only an honest institution loses this thoroughly. I propose that the Premier League adopt it as a compliance standard: Form PL-7(b), the Self-Certification of Defeat, under which any club wishing to demonstrate clean governance submits three heavy away losses, countersigned by the home supporters.

Critics will say that a verdict is a verdict. I accept the verdict. I object only to how it is being read. The verdict concerns the past. The weekend concerns the present, and the present, as anyone who watched it will agree, was conspicuously free of advantage of any kind.

Nor should we ignore the wider implications. If losing is evidence of probity, several clubs I could name, but will not, on legal advice I gave myself, are among the most scrupulously governed organisations in Europe. Nottingham Forest, by contrast, now has some explaining to do: winning so comfortably suggests an alarming want of probity. I propose they be made to lose three away matches immediately to clear their name, with the paperwork lodged in triplicate before the January window opens.

I therefore call on the Premier League to convene an independent review, not of Manchester City, but of the result. Should the panel find that City were genuinely and comprehensively outplayed, the club should be issued a certificate of good conduct, laminated, for display at the Etihad beside the trophies. At the present rate there will soon be ample wall space for it.