If Liverpool were considering parking the bus in the Champions League second leg on Tuesday, they should reconsiderForget the league title for a moment. This was an object lesson in why Manchester City are going to struggle to keep Liverpool’s players off the scoresheet when the Champions League quarter‑final resumes on Tuesday.At the moment City require four goals to go through – should Liverpool score they will need at least five – and allowing a feeble Manchester United back into this game from a position where they should have been dead and buried will have done nothing for their confidence. Related: Pogba inspires dramatic comeback win as Manchester United spoil City’s party Related: José Mourinho the ultimate party pooper rains on Guardiola’s parade | Jonathan...
After two seasons the Liverpool manager has found a system that works, led by the £75m signing Virgil van Dijk“If we have to score five goals to win, then so be it,” Vincent Kompany said when it was put to him that a single Liverpool goal at the Etihad on Tuesday would surely leave Manchester City with too much to do to progress in the Champions League. “We won’t stop believing. We will still take a positive attitude into the game and try to get through.”One can only admire the City captain’s confidence, though his assessment overlooks the fact that his side did not manage a single attempt on target in the first leg of the quarter-final at Anfield and the...
Manchester United manager pulls off a great escape to leave the champions elect, Manchester City, blushing after 3-2 home defeatThe ice melts sadly around the unopened champagne. The fireworks remain unfired, the streamers tightly furled. José Mourinho, perhaps the greatest wet blanket in football history, had done it again.Manchester City’s celebrations will come but they are deferred, and that was Mourinho’s primary objective. But he has offered further evidence of this City side’s curious vulnerability, inflicted a trauma that might yet resurface to significant effect in the future and, more even than that, shown that, however much Pep Guardiola wants to make football a game of three-dimensional chess, he can drag him into a bar fight, play the game on...
Offering Paul Pogba to his club’s rivals is a classic, aggressive Mino Raiola trick. But does this join up some of the dots when it comes to the deterioration in the player’s form?The first time Zlatan Ibrahimovic met Mino Raiola, the agent who has looked after his business for the last 15 years, was when a journalist friend, Thijs Sleiger from Voetbal International, had set them up with a meeting at the Okura hotel in Amsterdam. Ibrahimovic’s former agent, Anders Carlsson, had blown the previous arrangement by offering his client, then a player at Ajax, a move to Southampton (to which the young Zlatan apparently replied: “What the fuck! Southampton! Is that my level?”) The next guy, Ibrahimovic had been...
Jamie Pollock can now laugh at scoring potentially the most famous own goal in English football historyManchester City have a habit of scoring memorable goals against QPR, as Sergio Agüero will testify. For many City fans though, the Argentinian’s title-clincher still sits second to Jamie Pollock’s elaborate own goal in 1998, which almost certainly doomed the club to relegation to the third tier for the first time in their history.Like Agüero, the combative midfielder showed great composure and skill to bypass a couple of players before precisely heading the ball over his own goalkeeper, leaving a packed Maine Road silent. The goal made it 2-1 to the visitors and, although City would equalise, the draw meant Joe Royle’s side needed...