Pep Guardiola sat down for his post-Burnley press conference and said the quiet part out loud. Winning the title this year, he said, would not be his greatest achievement at Manchester City. It was a small sentence dressed up as humility, but the subtext was unmissable: he thinks they are going to win it, and he thinks everyone else should see what he sees. Three points at Turf Moor pulled City level with us on 70 points. The goal difference is identical at plus 37. The head-to-head is theirs. And from this moment forward, the Premier League title is decided not by who plays better, but by who is still standing in three weeks.

Let us start with the maths, because the maths is where all the media hand-wringing hides. We sit on 70 points with a goal difference of plus 37. City sit on 70 points with a goal difference of plus 37. City scored more goals than us this season and, crucially, are ahead in head-to-head after their 2-1 win at the Etihad last Sunday. If both clubs finish level on everything, the trophy goes to Manchester. So the only route that matters is the one where we finish with more points than them.

Our five remaining fixtures are Newcastle at home, Fulham at home, West Ham away, Burnley at home, and Crystal Palace away. Of those five, only one is a live contest in any meaningful sense. Burnley have already been relegated. Newcastle are 14th with three consecutive defeats, six points off seventh, and a manager whose own future is reportedly under review. Palace have a Conference League final to prepare for on 27 May and will host us on the final day of the league season with rotation already circled in red ink. Fulham are twelfth, three points off seventh, and have not looked like a side capable of stringing together the kind of run that would push them into Europe. That leaves West Ham away on 10 May as the only genuinely difficult test, and even that is only difficult if their survival is not already settled by the time we get there.

City's run is, on paper, the harder one. Their remaining league opponents are Everton away, Brentford at home, Bournemouth away, Aston Villa at home, and a rescheduled Crystal Palace fixture at the Etihad. Everton are three points off seventh. Brentford are level with seventh. Bournemouth are still on the hunt for Europe. All three have something to play for. So do Villa, who sit fourth and are still in a fight to retain their Champions League spot. On the fixture difficulty metric alone, City have the worse ride.

But fixture difficulty alone has never settled anything.

We play four matches between 25 April and 5 May. City play two. We face Atletico Madrid in the Champions League semi-final first leg on 29 April, four days after Newcastle, and then host Fulham on 2 May, three days after Madrid. The second leg against Atleti is on 5 May, three days after Fulham. City, in the same window, play an FA Cup semi-final against Southampton on 25 April and then have an eight-day gap before travelling to Everton on 4 May. This is the window where they can hit form at our expense.

The honest thing to say is that the first half of the run-in favours City heavily. The rest of it does not.

If City reach the FA Cup final, they are booked in at Wembley on 16 May. Their Premier League trip to Bournemouth will then be rescheduled. Their Palace home fixture has to slot in somewhere in that window too, and the final round of league matches against Villa arrives on 24 May. That is a cup final, a long away trip, a rearranged home game, and a match against a Champions League-chasing side, all stacked into nine days.

We, in the same window, play Burnley at home on 17 May and Palace away on 24 May. Six clear days between them. No European football, because if we have got past Atleti we are playing the Champions League final on 30 May, which is a week after our last league game.

The route to the title is simple to describe and brutal to execute. We have to come through the Champions League semi-finals without dropping league points on the way. We have to win at West Ham on 10 May, because if that game is still alive when it comes around, it will be the toughest fixture left in our run-in and the one where the league can most easily slip. And we have to hope, or trust, that City's most dangerous fixture of the run-in, Bournemouth away, comes on such little rest that something gives.

If City drop points at Bournemouth after that FA Cup final, we will be champions. Everything we do between now and 10 May is about making sure we are still standing when we get to it.

There will be questions whether our midfield can run a press for 90 minutes after 120 in Madrid. But that is not really where the title is going to be decided. It is going to be decided by legs and by minds. By whether a back four can play its fourth match in eleven days without the concentration slipping for one corner. Whether a striker still has the acceleration for a counter-attack in the 83rd minute when he has travelled from Madrid to London to the Emirates to Fulham and back. By whether Declan Rice and Martin Zubimendi can keep finding each other on the third day of recovery when it should be the fifth.

One slip is all it takes. We know this. City know this. Guardiola has been here more times than any manager in the country and he is already telling the world he expects to win. Arteta's job now is to make sure he does not.

The title is in our hands, not theirs. Dropping it would be unforgivable.