The Manchester City players celebrate after David Silva gave the home side a 2-0 lead

The Christmas period is undoubtedly the most important phase of the English football season and the position that a team occupies on Christmas Day is often not far from where they end up finishing when the curtain closes in on the campaign in May. The Premier League’s history books are full of teams who were in and around the relegation zone during the festive season, and were ultimately relegated when the League drew to a close. Similarly, staying in and around the top of the League is a sure fire way of ensuring that a team will end up near the top after all 38 games have been played. Keeping this theory in mind, fans of English football teams will be eagerly looking ahead to the busy run in that their teams will be heading into in just a few days time. The reasons behind their eagerness however, are very much different.

David Silva scores his second goal of the game after slotting the ball past a couple of Palace defenders

Fans of Manchester City however, will be looking forward to the festive period with a renewed sense of hope and optimism and the reason behind that is pretty simple. The Citizens head into the festive fixtures in a rich vein of form after winning their last six Premier League games. In fact, City are on an extremely impressive run of eight wins in a row in all competitions, and the last time they failed to win a football match was back in the first week of November when they were held to a draw by Queens Park Rangers. Their last win, which was also their last game before the Christmas run in got underway, was a convincing 3-0 win over Tony Pulis’ Crystal Palace, who are not at all an easy nut to crack. The three points that City managed to pick up after the win over Palace brought them level with Chelsea at the top of the Barclays Premier League. The Londoners who have a game in hand over us, still occupy first place however due to a slightly better goal difference than the Citizens, but all that could hardly matter by the time the festive season begins.  Their game in hand is a rather tricky fixture against Stoke City at the Brittania Stadium, a fixture that they lost under very dramatic circumstances last season. So if, by any chance they fail to pick up all three points from this game, the race between City and Chelsea for the first place will be all even stevens.

Yaya Toure scored City’s third on the night with a powerful left footed strike

All of us Manchester City fans will be hoping to see Chelsea slip up against Stoke which would really set us up for a very, very interesting week ahead with all teams playing three games in six days. Football is all about form and the form that Chelsea were in towards the start of the campaign made us think that they cannot be caught up with, but the impressive form the City are showing at this moment, coupled with a few slip ups from Chelsea have shifted the balance away from Jose Mourinho’s men and another slip up from the Blues would give us control of the Premier League title race.