Venturing onto Twitter after Manchester City's 2-1 defeat at Crystal Palace on Monday night was a hazardous operation best conducted with fireproof clothing and an oxygen mask. City's great and good, silly and imbecilic were all out strutting their stuff, either incandescent with rage or feeling thoroughly downtrodden and weather-beaten in their postmatch gloom.
The defeat, slightly unlucky, slightly reminiscent of so many other toothless performances this season, drops them into fourth place in the Premier League table, not a location to make hearts sing nor make Manuel Pellegrini's paymasters cluck contentedly about the future.
In fact, if the season closes in a similarly chaotic fashion and an automatic place in the Champions League is not claimed, there is likely to be no Chilean ready to take the club on next August. Although who would be considered good enough to take the reins is up for debate.
Amid all the instant anger on Twitter there were those who suggested the manager should be removed instantaneously, those that thought half the playing staff should be docked wages, given a good talking to by public-transport stymied fans, and of course a few who asserted that only cold-blooded murder would suffice for all concerned.
Some pointed out the almost total lack of acknowledgment from the players of the travelling support at the end of the game; others just wanted to go home and hibernate. In April. This is how bad it has become.
As Pellegrini stated rather ill-advisedly at the final whistle, City played, if not "rather well," then certainly in an accomplished enough manner to have won this game at a canter. Sadly, for the umpteenth time, there was little or no cutting edge up front, a slightly odd thing to have to say about an attacking weapon comprised of Jesus Navas, David Silva, Edin Dzeko and Sergio Aguero.
This is hardly a team with little punch, no guile and an absence of big time nous. Still, we live in strange times and there are few things stranger than Manchester City at present. For all City's massive territorial advantage and possession, only rarely did they come close to making a breakthrough, with Dzeko once again invisible, Yaya Toure shuffling around and Navas and Silva over-elaborating.
If you squeezed your eyes close together, you could almost see the ineffectual Arsenal sides of the last 10 years: devastatingly pretty, nonchalant and calm, pert and skilful; controlled in their beautiful passing triangles, but ultimately toothless and playing 27 well-constructed sideways and backwards passes when six might have done the trick.
As they used to with the Gunners, everyone knows how to derail City's patient, passing game and, in going in to half-time 1-0 up, Palace proved themselves no slouches in picking up tips from Burnley, CSKA, West Ham, Liverpool and any number of other sides who have successfully hassled City out of their pretty stride. Yet even the second half, where City found themselves 2-0 down after a matter of minutes, started positively and -- after the goal, a beautifully flighted free kick from Jason Puncheon -- continued to flow more or less constantly in one direction.
Referee Michael Oliver and his team saw to the rest, with yet another game blighted by horrendous short-sighted officiating. Palace's first goal featured not one but two separate offside incidents and Glenn Murray's handball in second half was a gesture more likely to be witnessed in a volleyball match than in professional football. On both occasions, the referee and his team blithely waved away protests, content in their cocoon of fallibility.
But there is no hiding away from City's limitations. Their season effectively ran out of steam the moment their name was pulled out of the UEFA hat alongside Barcelona's. At that point, a psychological blow of catastrophic proportions was landed. With two domestic cups thrown to the winds without a care and a shoddy, haphazard defence of their title underway (still the club's second best title defence in their history, mind you...), City's season has been floating dead in the water for many weeks so really the Palace result should not have come as much of a surprise.
What the powers above Pellegrini must now discover are the causes for why this has been allowed to happen.
Is it a manager who is too kind, too gentle, too forgiving and, perhaps, tactically speaking, too stubborn? Is it a bunch of players, who have run their course with the club, too well fed, well treated, well paid, to consider the hassle of weekly Premier League skirmishes appropriate for their status? Is it a squad, who cannot be bothered to acknowledge the travelling fans, cannot be bothered to tap into the culture and are seemingly blissfully unaware of what it means to the supporters of the club?
Or is it simply time telling us all that this particular cycle, involving the scintillating resurrection of the club to the game's highest peaks, is coming slowly but surely to its natural close?
Whatever it may be, those hoping for a title battle really should not have got their hopes up so high. Chelsea's relentless if untroubled run to this season's shiny pot has long been rubber-stamped by their contenders' mediocrity. Now, the much-maligned Manchester United of Louis van Gaal's vintage sit above City in the table and entertain them in the Old Trafford derby this weekend. One can only wonder how Twitter will deal with the niceties of that.