A stop-start game of muscle and rancour ended in heartbreak for Arsenal.
Gavin Cooney HISTORY TEACHES US you have to beat Manchester City in order to beat them to the league, but all the same it would be harsh in the extreme to label what Arsenal did today as any kind of failure.
But this is the credibility problem into which the Premier League has walked, so to give this coarse, compelling heavyweight battle the obsessive and slightly-hysterical post-mortem which forms much of this competition’s appeal is to acknowledge this fact and then compartmentalise it. The game was threaded through these two moments. It was a stop-start choreography of muscle and rancour, around which a football match occasionally broke out. City began slickly, and in picking Jeremy Doku and Savinho, Pep Guardiola targeted Arsenal out wide, which Spurs failed abjectly to do a week ago.
Arsenal looked like they might be overwhelmed, but the whole occasion jacknifed on Rodri’s jarred knee. He crumpled to the ground in the penalty area after meagre contact and limped gingerly off, before the full whack of pain hit him on the touchline. Few things cause City to sweat, but the potential severity of Rodri’s injury would be enough to move bookies’ odds.Soon Guardiola was kicking his high-backed bench seat in fury.
Oliver’s was the correct call, though even the Arsenal fans with short memories could recall Howard Webb’s excuse for Oliver’s failure to send Mateo Kovacic off for two obvious yellows in the Emirates clash last year: Michael didn’t want to ruin the game. Arsenal have a voracious appetite for this kind of stuff, though, and they helped to make City look toothless. Most of these City back-and-forths ended with the ball at Ruben Dias, whose shots became more and more forlorn. Some went so high as to have been decent drop goal attempts.
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