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Manchester City brushed past Leicester City, but after cruising into a comfortable lead they found themselves hanging on to a surprising extent.
By the time that thirty minutes had been played at The Etihad Stadium, it felt as though this was the new manager bounce for which Leicester City had been hoping. Indeed, hiring a new manager and when his first game will be away to Manchester City feels a little bit like hiring them, pushing them straight out of the window of the 50th storey of a skyscraper, and hoping that the team will bounce when he hits the pavement. But by the end of this game, Leicester may even have seen a crack of light amid the darkness after a spirited late showing against complacent opponents.
Leicester’s new coaching triumvirate of Smith, Craig Shakespeare and *checks notes* John Terry set their team up as an apparent exercise in damage limitation, which worked reasonably effectively for about four and a half minutes, until John Stones hoiked the ball into the top corner of the goal. They subsequently implemented Plan B, which was to change nothing whatsoever, the sum result of which was that Manchester City were three up in 25 minutes.
A strangely lengthy VAR wait came about before a handball decision that was obvious was awarded against Wilfred Ndidi. Of course, such matters as nerves don’t affect The Flaxen-Haired Nordic Goalbot, who converted the resulting penalty kick via the inside of the post. Fourteen minutes later, Kevin De Bruyne nicked the ball from Ndidi and fed the ball to Haaland who, well, we all know how this turns out, don’t we?
It certainly feels as though Haaland is the perfect synthesis of the very best that Manchester City have offered as a team in recent years. The relentlessness is obvious. As sure as night follows day, Haaland will score a goal. But it’s also a matter of the precision and timing of his movement, the extent to which all that preparation reaps such inevitable rewards when matchday comes around.
At 3-0 up, they relieved the pressure a little bit. Manchester City were still camped in Leicester’s half, of course, but the pace began to slow a little as the half progressed. To even things up a little, at half-time Haaland was withdrawn and replaced by Julian Alvarez. Perhaps he’s already running out of space in his garden shed for match balls. And they didn’t look the same without him in the second half.
Arsenal supporters hoping for Manchester City to slip up were never likely to be satisfied by this match. Even without taking into account the recent managerial upheaval at The King Power Stadium, Leicester have been in wretched form of late, and replacing Brendan Rodgers with Dean Smith, but only after Graham Potter and Jesse Marsch had turned them down, was going to lead to the level of bounce required to have any chance whatsoever of getting a result from a match like this.
But even though the truth of the matter is that Manchester City seem to have completed their process of moving up through the gears and are now at cruising altitude, they did hit a little turbluence entirely of their own making in the closing stages. Since losing to Spurs at the start of February – a result which now seems so unlikely that it feels a little as though it might have been either a collective hallucination or beamed from a parallel universe into ours – they’ve had twelve wins and two draws from fourteen games. It will already require something approaching a miracle for them to miss out on a place in the semi-finals of the Champions League, and they face relatively moderate opposition in the FA Cup semi-finals in the form of Sheffield United.
The stars seem to be aligning, and a Premier League season which has been more interesting than most may yet end in a clean sweep for the oil money only being disrupted by City’s failure to win the EFL Cup, a state of affairs which is unlikely to have kept Pep Guardiola awake at night since they surprisingly lost to Southampton in January. This sheer relentlessness is what any opponents have to keep pace with if they are to win the Premier League. Last season, Liverpool fell short by a point. Arsenal now have to deal with that relentless churn for the rest of this season.
Yet there were wobbles, on this occasion. With fifteen minutes to play, Harry Souttar’s header was blocked by Edersen, but Kelechi Iheanacho tapped the ball over the line to pull a goal back. Suddenly enervated, and with City having slowed the game to crawling pace, Leicester looked surprisingly as though they could get back into the game. A couple of minutes passed and Iheanacho shot narrowly high and wide. Had that gone in, we might have been set up for an exciting closing ten minutes. With five to play, some even more lackadaisical defending allowed James Maddison through on goal, but his shot was blocked by Edersen. In stoppage-time, Iheanacho got through again, but this time saw his shot bounce out off the base of the post.
All might not be lost for Leicester City, should they be able to show a little of the resolve that they showed once they got a goal back in this game. They’re not as young – or in some cases as effective – as they used to be, but players such as Maddison, Vardy, Iheanacho and Patson Daka all have the experience or quality to be able to pull out the points they need to maintain Premier League football for at least another season. And Pep Guardiola’s brow may well have been furrowed by the fact that his team almost let a team in such a wretched run of form back into a game which they had more or less wrapped up by half-time. In the end Erling Haaland was the difference between these two teams, but Pep Guardiola might have been hoping for something more than this against such moderate opposition.
READ MORE: The ridiculous stats of Erling Haaland: equals Salah; top PL duo within his mighty grasp
