MANCHESTER, England — On the sideline, in the pouring rain, Antonio Conte did not look much like a manager who supposedly no longer cares, who has apparently long since accepted that his time at Chelsea is nearly over. He shouted and he bawled, at his players and at the officials, at the situation and at the gods. If it is an act, it is a good one.

On the field, meanwhile, Chelsea’s players did not look as if they were harboring dark thoughts of rebellion. They might have struggled to lay a glove on Manchester City; they might have slipped, without much of a whimper, to a dour 1-0 defeat, but they made for strange revolutionaries.

They doggedly remained in shape. They determinedly tracked their runners. They did all they could not to be mesmerized, as so many have been this season, by the swirling patterns City can paint; they closed the space and they gritted their teeth. They stuck to the tasks Conte had given them. Prospective mutineers tend not to follow orders so well.

Whenever Chelsea finds itself stuck in a rut, whenever an occasional defeat becomes a run of them, it is easy to assume that the problem, and the solution, are the same as always, that history is about to repeat itself.