Manchester City left Liverpool with the win on Sunday in a Premier League fixture that had been built up as one of the most eagerly anticipated matches in the competition’s recent history. The game turned on Liverpool being reduced to 10 men, after which City, a man to the good, won at something close to a canter. The first half in particular offered little to remember, and it was only once the hosts were a player short that the contest tilted decisively.
The build-up promised considerably more hostility than the occasion delivered. City’s players walked out to a loud chorus of booing, and banners in the stands reminded them of the club’s serial cheating. In the away end, City’s supporters responded with a defiant “doing” of the Poznan. Beyond that, one of the most hyped Premier League fixtures in living memory passed off without anything much in the way of flashpoints.
City’s players, supporters and head coach have since been criticised for milking the win. Given the hostility they were subjected to, their satisfaction in the face of an emphatic victory was more than a little understandable. The Football Daily newsletter makes the point that the vast majority of the current squad are not tainted by direct association with the financial chicanery perpetrated by the club’s owners — but that it is fair to say the arrival of many of the stars who embarrassed Liverpool is not entirely unrelated to the period that preceded it.
Away from the pitch, the most fascinating aspect of the match was the manner in which it was covered. Sky assembled a heavyweight punditry line-up of Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Micah Richards and Daniel Sturridge, each of whom made a decent fist of condemning City for cheating while stopping short of the more awkward observation about the product their employers have been selling subscribers. On TNT Sports the previous day, Joe Cole had addressed City’s guilty verdict.
Gary Neville was the most forthcoming of the group. “If you could take me off Manchester City games moving forward for the next few months until the verdicts have been heard, I would be absolutely delighted,” he said. “At the end of the game it is quite hard because you are imagining, basically, if these guilty verdicts are confirmed, there is going to be a huge cloud hanging over the whole league.” The guilty verdict has in fact already been confirmed and is now simply subject to appeal, which leaves the league staging a multibillion-pound mirage: every City fixture, goal, trophy lift and victory parade liable to fade in and out of existence until a final, definitive decree arrives.
Elsewhere, Forest Green Rovers owner Dale Vince has decided to press on without a manager following Robbie Savage’s departure for Peterborough. “Nobody’s in the frame, nobody’s connected to the job, at the minute there’s no vacancy,” Vince said. “At the moment, we’re going to try something new, we’re going to see how it goes and we’ll see where it goes … We like where we are, we’re going to see how it goes, maybe for a few games, maybe for a month. The coaching team have been doing the heavy lifting anyway.” It has not been an immediate success: Hartlepool United ended a six-match losing run by winning 4-2 in the National League.