“Today we are under minimums”, they warned in Manchester City before the FA Cup semifinal against Liverpool, and that’s how it was. The sky blue team arrived at Wembley after three games of maximum tension in the previous eleven days, in which they faced Atlético de Madrid twice and Liverpool once.
The citizen team dragged many hours of fatigue, so Pep Guardiola was forced to rotate to play against Jürgen Klopp’s team. Without Kyle Walker, still injured, and with Ruben Días and Kevin De Bruyne, still convalescingthe Spanish coach left Laporte out of the eleven and opted for a defensive line with Joao Cancelo and Oleksander Zinchenko as full-backs and with John Stones and Nathan Aké as central defenders.
A defense of circumstances that failed to stop Liverpool’s push in the early stages of the duel. Already, shortly after starting, in the 9th minute, Konaté made good the superiority of the reds and won the game over Aké from a corner. That was the first goal conceded by the City defense, which in the 18th minute he would see how Steffen, his goalkeeper yesterday -although he is usually a substitute-, gave Mané the 0-2.
However, the 0-3 was still to come. In another mismatch of the citizen defense, Mané found himself unmarked in the right profile of the area and returned to score his double just before half-time. It was the conclusion of a first half in which the Manchester team was at the mercy of Liverpool, who He put down Guardiola’s proposal, despite the fact that he had an investment of more than 470 million euros on the pitch…
Despite the rotations, the back line, made up of theoretical substitutes, cost City 158 million euros, according to Transfermarkt. Cancelo (65 million), Stones (55.6), Aké (45.3) and Zinchenko (2) failed to contain the vehement Mané in the first 45 minutes. But his fellow attackers yesterday didn’t make a difference either.
His comeback attempt in the second half fell by the wayside. Neither Jack Grealish’s goal, for which they spent 117 million euros last summer, nor Bernardo Silva’s (another 50 million) were enough to tie the game. Sterling (63.7 million) tried for his band, but eleven of the almost 500 million ended up shipwrecked at Wembley…