Micah Richards watched his old club win 3-0 at Anfield and shrugged. Of course they did.
The former City defender was on punditry duty for Sky Sports as Erling Haaland, Jeremy Doku and Rayan Cherki each found the net in a performance that arrived days after an independent panel found the club guilty of the vast majority of the 115 charges brought against them. City will appeal.
For Richards, the timing was no coincidence.
"It's difficult because when you're in the dressing room and there's outside noise it makes you stronger," he said, as quoted by BBC Sport.
"It's us against the world. The performance was always going to happen."
That is the mood around the club right now: a siege mentality, whether it was consciously adopted or simply the natural reaction to a week of headlines. City played well at Anfield and were good value for their win, which is not a sentence anyone writes lightly.
The wider picture, though, is messier. Every result from here will be read through the prism of what we now know about how the club went about buying its success. Wins invite question marks. Performances invite question marks. There is no clean way back from that.
Richards knows it. He also knows the dressing room he once occupied. Criticism, in his experience, does not soften players at City — it hardens them. The response was always going to arrive at some point. It arrived at Anfield, of all places.
The appeal will run its course. The football, meanwhile, keeps happening.