We all hate pre-season. The players hate it – it’s bloody tough. The managers hate it – getting in new signings and trying to get everything in place for the new season is much harder than simply getting the team to play well. The fans hate it – there’s only so much cricket you can watch!

So thankfully it’s over, this summery hell. This weekend sees the return of the Premier League in all its splendour, and we can talk about actual football again.

That must be a relief to Manuel Pellegrini and Manchester City fans, who have had to put up with a lot this summer. From worrying about whether Fair Play regulations would be relaxed or not, to worrying about having enough ‘homegrown’ players to represent the Citizens in the Champions League next season. Then the sagas involving Raheem Sterling and Fabian Delph and all of the fan and media contention surrounding those moves.

Now it’s poor pre-season form that City have to deal with. Or at least, it is if you believe the commentators.

Shipping four goals to Stuttgart – these days strutting their stuff in much lower reaches of the Bundesliga than where we’re used to seeing them – was clearly a poor performance, especially from the defenders. And it’s prompted knee-jerk reaction from those who think a poor pre-season performance is a sound indicator of how this Manchester City team is going to fare next season.

The favourites for the title are Chelsea, indeed Chelsea have been favourites for the 2015-16 Premier League crown since about February-time it seems. The standard wisdom seems to suggest that Arsenal will challenge them closest, but that discounting Manchester United would be foolish, presumably because they’ve spent money like a drunken sailor in a warm port-town who has been told he only has a week to live.

That’s all on the back of how lacklustre City were in February and March and on their up and down pre-season. Particularly the Stuttgart game where Kompany and Mangala were terrible, leaving fans to question whether Kompany is still the player he was two years ago, whether Mangala will ever grow into a Premier League defender. Aside from those two, City have Martin Demichelis who is surely too old now to be considered a top centre-back and Jason Denayer, who has done well for Celtic and earned a Belgium call-up, but who is unproven at the very top level.

All of these things are, to a certain extent, true. City’s defence deserves to be questioned: Kompany has been poor by his high standards, Mangala has never looked like a £32m player and Demichelis is 34. But they also deserve the chance to put things right.

We have to remember that the whole of the City team – with the exception of Sergio Aguero – was sub-par last season, but they were sub-par three seasons ago too. When Sir Alex Ferguson wrestled the title back from City, the entire City team was sub-par. The next season they came back and won the league again, scoring over 100 goals. Just because they had a terrible season last time around doesn’t mean they will next season. It’s frustrating for City fans that Kompany and friends can’t keep it going, but there’s no reason to think that they can’t get it going again this season. Not yet anyway. It’s too soon to panic.

Especially on the back of pre-season.

A pre-season friendly tells us absolutely nothing about a team’s form or quality. If Kompany was poor against Stuttgart then it might just tell us that he wasn’t feeling the Stuttgart game. So long as he’s fit for the new season and doesn’t have a shocker against West Brom on Monday night then there’s no need for Pellegrini to panic.

City are being written off this season, and that’s a dangerous thing. With Aguero, Silva, Sterling, Toure, Navas and Nasri to call on they are a very dangerous team, if not the most dangerous in the league. Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, one summer doesn’t make a poor team. City still have some world class players and we might just see them prove it over the next ten months.