Shortly after the hour mark at the Etihad last night there was a small, but palpable, discomfort among some viewers - voyeurs, even - of Manchester City’s vivisection of Burton Albion.

Expressions of vicarious guilt ranged from suggestions that it was “getting a bit uncomfortable” to apparently serious accusations of “disrespect” towards a fellow semi-finalist. But before we get stuck into the anatomy of a football thrashing, we should perhaps consider the wise words of the high priest of Right Hammerings, Mr Danny Baker:

As if anyone comes out of a football ground on a Saturday afternoon, hears the results filtering through, and says: ‘Ooh, I see Leeds had a great victory’. No, no - what you say is: ‘I see Palace got a right hammering!’ Because that’s what’s important: who was embarrassed, who was thrashed, walloped, humiliated.

Baker taps into the often violent language that surrounds such spectacles: thrashed, hammered, battered - to name but three - are verbs essentially based around being hit hard and repeatedly into submission. My colleague Jason Burt, not unreasonably, described last night’s mismatch as “a brutal demolition; a goal-lust.”

City were arguably rather more surgical than that, with Burton having already been administered the general anaesthetic of 51 league places and about £490m in annual turnover. Gabriel Jesus nipped and tucked away four for himself, before Kyle Walker - going into the game with a total of seven career goals - scored the eighth, in an almost-too-perfect live demonstration of the footballing phrase “getting in on the act”.

Kyle Walker slots home Manchester City's eighth goal against Burton credit: ACTION IMAGES

Over on the touchline, Burton manager Nigel Clough wasn’t quite reading from the body-language script, opting to remain slumped in the comfortable Etihad dugout rather than adopt the traditional, statuesque, edge-of-technical area stance of futile defiance.

“Quite a few of the players were wide-eyed at half-time,” Clough sighed afterwards. “They had seen it on television, but they could not believe it first-hand. They said some of their lads did not even seem to be ­running, but were gliding around the pitch.”

In the Sky Sports studio, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink - whose spell as Burton manager between 2014-15 meant he couldn’t quite join in with the neutral’s morbid fascination - had the unenviable job of actually having to apply some punditry to what was barely a football match. Some words were apparently spoken as each training-ground goal was replayed, but one’s eyes were still drawn towards the bottom-left corner, where a relentless reminder was displayed: MC 9-0 BURT | FT

Nine-goal thrashings come with their mandatory newspaper headlines

As a relatively low-scoring sport, football is perhaps most ideally designed to cultivate such fascination with thrashings. Rugby may conjure up the occasional, hopeless 80-point annihilation, while the boxing equivalent - Mike Tyson knocking out several of his opponents within the first 40 seconds - ticks the brutality box but, by definition, lacks the torturous appeal of football’s 90-minute dismantlings.

When it comes to cricket, ironically enough, there seems to be some confusion over its own version of football’s proverbial “cricket score”, but perhaps only being bowled out for less than 50 can compare. Tennis could squeeze in a double-bagelling within a relatively compassionate hour or so. Are any of those quite the same spectacle as a football thrashing? Could horse racing ever manage its own Arbroath 36 Bon Accord 0 moment?

Cricket's equivalent of football's 'cricket score'? credit: GETTY IMAGES

Back to last night, though. Anyone among the overwhelming majority whose conscience wasn’t wrestling with Burton’s rapidly sapping self-belief found themselves glancing at the top of the screen, hoping that the clock wouldn’t outrace the scoreline. Gabriel Jesus converting City’s seventh after 65 minutes made for some reassuring calculations, and the first real prospect of what fans so often want: ten.

While “9-0” remains oddly pleasing to the eye, there appears to be something of a top-level taboo about ten. 26 and a half seasons of the Premier League, for example, have delivered a healthy number of seven-goal thrashings, no fewer than seven instances of eight-goal hauls and a couple of nines, but not yet a perfect ten.

This seems an anomaly, even allowing for feet being taken off pedals and the odd bout of closing-stages showboating (not to mention the merciful refereeing misconduct of adding on just two minutes to put one team out of their slow-cooked misery), and who knows how many potential 10-0s have been disgracefully aborted by one of the neutral’s ultimate footballing irritations: a first-half thrashing being followed by just a single goal in the second half.

City, to their arguable credit, didn’t stroll over the line, but did stop short of summoning 6ft 6in goalkeeper Aro Muric forward for a set-piece to help squeeze home a tenth: perhaps there is a point where tastefulness takes over after all.

Still, the rest of us not-so-secretly wanted Burton’s sudden, spirited last stand to relent, just so we could enjoy the aesthetics of Sky Sports’ score caption ticking over to double figures (would it fit in the space? Shouldn’t they have a graphical contingency for this sort of thing? Would it just make the whole broadcast crash, like the Millennium bug?), much like when a lengthy stoppage raises the tantalising prospect of the clock reaching the low-key promised land of 100:00.

If there really was a moral quandary buried somewhere within Pep Guardiola’s desire to get the tie dead and buried in the first leg - and exhumed and then, just to be sure, buried again, at sea - then it wasn’t for us, as paid spectators, to wrestle with. There is likely to be a Burton fan or two who fondly remembers their club-record 12-1 evisceration of Coalville Town in the Birmingham Senior Cup back in 1954, and feels not a pang of guilt to this day.

Nobody wants this to happen every week, but the odd thrashing is good for the soul, a rare challenge for sub-editors (at least three national newspapers opted for “cloud nine” on their back page) a novelty for commentators, an excuse for gallows humour among the vanquished, and a reminder that - just occasionally - someone is just miles better at something than someone else.

Does a notable football thrashing stick out in your memory? Let us know an occasion when you have enjoyed watching a top team pummel a lower league side by commenting below.

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