There’s a bit of an unknown when it comes to Peter Bankes and his affiliations. The secret is out for a few in his line of work, but Bankes is a vault. His team? He’s never let that slip, which is frightfully boring when you learn he will be in the VAR hutch for Nottingham Forest’s game with Manchester City on Sunday.

In light of Forest’s little tantrum about Stuart Attwell, and the amusing connotations of a Luton Town sleeper agent at Stockley Park, how dull to draw such a blank. That won’t generate any mutters or tweets from under the tinfoil hats within the City Ground.

What we do know is Bankes is from Merseyside and that he is a 42-year-old man who, like Attwell, is presumably quite able to resist the timeless whispers from posters on his childhood walls.

That is because he is a grown-up and an accomplished professional. And most grown-up, accomplished professionals are vaguely sensible at work, even if Forest’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, seems to be a fraction behind that curve. But we all enjoy a silly moan from time to time, which is rather the point of this discussion as we look ahead to what might be termed the moaner’s derby.

I’m a touch conflicted in my assessment of one particular thought: who out of Forest and Pep Guardiola warrants the least sympathy for silly moans this week? Or to look at it another way, who will be the last moaner standing on Sunday evening?

That feels like an easier one to get into. City losing? Unthinkable. It’s not what they do, especially when the evenings get lighter. They surge and they run off in front. Phil Foden sees the pass that bit sooner.

Kyle Walker overlaps that much faster and whips the cross. Kevin De Bruyne even scores with his head now. When it all gets more important in the Premier League, City win until there is no more winning to be done.

They don’t stumble and fall like Liverpool did at Everton and they don’t double fault against Aston Villa like Arsenal.

They trail in the table, which makes this title dance so wonderful, but they have the games in hand and games in hand are worth points on the board with this lot. Their success feels inevitable.

But my goodness is Guardiola a moaner. A special manager and a special kind of moaner, just like all the greats. Champions of sport, champions of style, champions of silly moaning.

And that’s the only reason for us to nurture any scintilla of a suspicion that City will lose one of their final five league games, because Guardiola has taken to dangling the possibility that his robot army might ‘fall down’ at any moment with fatigue.

He has science on his side and common sense – we all know the attrition at this stage of the season is great. We are also well aware that the scheduling between their Real Madrid defeat and the FA Cup semi-final with Chelsea might have been kinder, not least because he got quite silly about that one, too.

But it’s about relativity and the reality that City have the strongest vehicle in a demolition derby – they were able to swap out four men for the Chelsea game and then three against Brighton, with a bench that cost £320million to assemble for the latter.

Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal bench against Chelsea was worth around half as much. When Jurgen Klopp saw his players ache, flap and flop against Everton, he had around £70m of options to consider for changes, three of them from the academy.

Those are the three best clubs in the land and each has faced multi-faceted challenges against exhaustion this season. But the battle is uneven because City have by far the deepest talent pool.

They can afford to manage the minutes of a £55m gem in Jeremy Doku. They can float £53m on Matheus Nunes for what has predominantly been a substitute’s role. They can swap Jack Grealish in as easily as out.

They can withstand the loss of Erling Haaland, Foden and De Bruyne and could probably survive losing Rodri as well. At City, the next man up is always first class; there might be drop-offs but no falls.

They never seem as though they are down to the bare bones, nor do they go to the places that Klopp went with that team of kids who won the League Cup. Season after season, City always have enough to find comfort in uncomfortable spots.

In this campaign, for which they are favourites for a fourth title in a row, it has regularly been noted they have lost only once, via a penalty shootout, since December 6.

Just as they have not been beaten in a league game in the crucial months of March or April since 2021, a year when they had the division tied up so tight by February that their entire first team could have gone yodelling in the Alps for the entirety of spring and still won the medal.

No one would doubt the quality of Guardiola’s coaching in those runs, nor the mental resolve of the players, but they have bought themselves weapons-grade protection for when the going gets rough. For that time when it is less about the quality of the team and more about a squad’s ability to maintain a winning level against fatigue and pressure.

Wearisome as it might be to some, we should view all of that in the context of those 115 charges and the legal mysteries around how the machine was built. And we must because it is central to it — financial power is the single greatest variable within football and did City wield theirs outside the rules?

That is the biggest question in British sport and a beautiful team should not pull our eyes away from it, especially at a point of the season when the benefits of such spending are clearest to see.

To have any sympathy for City’s workload would therefore seem perverse in the extreme. Yes, they are fatigued. Of course they are. But no more so than the squads that have far fewer questions to answer around their creation.

For Guardiola to moan about it, to even draw attention to it, is far sillier than wondering aloud if Stuart Attwell might be out to get you. It is far more tiresome and considerably less entertaining.

Even when Terry’s right, he’s wrong

John Terry gave an insight into Andre Villas Boas’s brief reign at Chelsea this week and it centred on a row he and a few senior players had with the manager on a trip to Hong. The contention was that they would do a leg of the journey in economy and a few younger lads would go in first class.

In his summary, Terry explained to Mail Sport columnist Simon Jordan’s Up Front podcast: ‘He [Villas-Boas] tried to make a statement on day one and failed instantly. Because I promise you, if that plane was going, it would have gone without myself, Frank (Lampard) and Didier (Drogba).’

Here’s a thing with Terry that has never changed — even when he is making a halfway reasonable point, he still has no awareness of how words sound when they leave his mouth.

Time to follow Sweden’s example

Sweden invented the ultrasound scanner, GPS, adjustable spanners, dynamite and zips. They have sharp minds for this stuff. But I do wonder if they’ve overtaken much of that with their latest bit of thinking — they don’t like VAR and decided not to use it in their leagues. Simple and brilliant.

Where Sweden lead we should once more all follow, starting with a few sticks of their dynamite to blow that loathsome concept back to a place where no GPS could ever find it.