Drama as Liverpool trump City
Liverpool ride City storm to book return to Champions League semi-finals after 10-year absence
LIVERPOOL survived a Manchester City onslaught to reach the Champions League semi-finals on a controversial night at the Etihad Stadium that saw Pep Guardiola sent off.
Second-half goals from Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino killed off any hopes of a City fightback after an early Gabriel Jesus strike, securing a 2-1 victory and a 5-1 aggregate success in a compelling quarter-final.
There was even more drama in Rome, where Barcelona crashed out after a remarkable 3-0 win for Roma saw the Catalan giants lose out despite winning the first leg 4-1.
However, in Manchester the scale of the challenge proved too much for the hosts as they attempted to salvage the tie after last week’s 3-0 loss at Anfield.
Jesus’ second-minute effort electrified the crowd before Bernardo Silva hit the woodwork and Leroy Sane had a goal wrongly disallowed for offside. That sparked angry protests from City and manager Guardiola was sent to the stand for his reaction after the halftime whistle.
City could not match their first-half intensity after the break and Liverpool professionally closed out a place in the semi-finals of Europe’s elite competition for a 10th time.
Guardiola confirmed his dismissal was for his complaints to the referee at half-time. “I said he was wrong. That is why sent me off. I didn’t insult him. I said it was a penalty and the ball came off Milner,” said the City boss, who felt the decisions before the interval made a big difference to the game.
He said: “It is different 1-0 to 2-0. In these kind of games the impact is so big.”
Guardiola had no complaints about the overall result. He said: “Big congratulations to Liverpool. They are a top team with an outstanding manager. Liverpool deserved to go through.”
MANCHESTERCITY 1 LIVERPOOL 2 Sam Wallace
BY the time it was all over, it was hard not to reflect on the line from that old Anfield song about enduring a storm and emerging on the other side triumphant and stronger for the experience, although Jurgen Klopp could never have imagined this would go as well as it did.
The storm did come for Liverpool in the first half, when Pep Guardiola’s team seemed to occupy every critical part of the pitch in every moment and were ahead within two minutes in a torrent of pressure that made the head spin.
Yet by the end it was not just that City had not scored the three goals required to level the tie, they had not even won the match and it is Klopp’s side who go through to the Champions League semi-finals with an emphatic 5-1 aggregate win.
Guardiola was sent off at half-time and obliged to watch from the stands, and his team derailed by a goal from the sublime Mohamad Salah in the 56th minute that changed the mood as completely as Paul Pogba’s first had done three days earlier.
When the Egyptian came off with a few minutes left to play – the Etihad emptying, the away fans raucous – Klopp hugged his goalscorer for so long that you wondered if they might watch the last few minutes together arm-in-arm.
ONSLAUGHT
Somehow Liverpool had survived the first-half onslaught that followed Gabriel Jesus’s goal, and they were lucky that a second for Leroy Sane’s was wrongly ruled offside perhaps confirming all Guardiola’s misgivings about the Spanish referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz.
Lahoz had no hesitation in sending off the City manager although you wonder why Guardiola gave him the opportunity, and from then on it went from bad to worse.
There were heroic performances from Dejan Lovren and Virgil van Dijk in defence, in contrast to a Nicolas Otamendi horror show in the second half, as he gifted Roberto Firmino the second goal.
City have now lost three in a row and will go to Wembley to face Tottenham on Saturday with the possibility that it could be four. A team briefly considered invincible has been beaten three times now by Klopp.
The thunderstorm broke on cue over the Etihad at 7.45pm, not Manchester’s regular precipitation this time, but the relentless pressure that Klopp had predicted from the outset.
It is one thing to forecast this City team in full cry and chasing down a three-goal deficit, but it is another to witness the storm itself.
They finished the half with 71 per cent possession, which is not uncommon for Guardiola’s teams, although it would be right to say that every minute was played like it was the last of time added on at the end of the last match ever played in the history of football.
The intensity was overwhelming and Liverpool were clinging on from the very start, obliged to take the bookings when they had to and hope that Leroy Sane’s succession of crosses did not find their target.
At the half-time whistle, Klopp turned and jogged down the tunnel, his team one goal behind on the night. It should have been two, but the Spanish officiating team wrongly ruled out a goal from Sane as offside when the ball had been deflected back towards the German by James Milner, making the City winger’s position irrelevant.
City’s game-plan was no different to most weeks: the ball inevitably found its way to Kevin De Bruyne and, from there, City hit the left wing. Sane was the main target, but David Silva was often on the overlap to outnumber Trent Alexander-Arnold, who did remarkably well in the circumstances. From there, they tried to pick out their man in the box, at which they were less successful.
The goal had come within the first two minutes and, at that point, it seemed like City would have no trouble chasing down the deficit.
It was a foul by Raheem Sterling on Virgil van Dijk as the defender played an uncertain pass from an unusual position on the left touchline. The ball had left his feet by the time Sterling shoved the Dutchman over but, even so, given the low bar that referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz had set, it was a free-kick.
From there City’s response was rapid, moving the ball from Bernardo Silva’s intervention to Fernandinho to Sterling and then a cross to Jesus, who finished first time with his right foot. It was not for another five minutes that Liverpool had another sequence of possession and there was much more to come.
It was clear that City were going to make as much as possible of any foul and, by the end of the first half, Alexander-Arnold, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino had all been booked. Mane slipped in challenging Nicolas Otamendi and accidentally studded the prone Argentine. It merited the booking, although probably not the sequence of rolls that Otamendi then executed to emphasise his discomfort.
City were so firmly in control of the midfield that there was very little Klopp’s team could do to prevent the ball going out to Sane and, once Alexander-Arnold was booked for an arm thrust across the German’s throat, it was on a knife-edge for the young Liverpudlian.
DEFLECTED
Generally speaking, Liverpool defended the ball into the box well but by the end of the half they were riding their luck. Lovren got a head to a Bernardo shot which hit a post. Another had been deflected wide
It was the disallowed goal that must have enraged Guardiola, sent off having confronted the referee Mateu Lahoz at the whistle for half-time. He took his seat in the stand for the second half.
Guardiola’s absence did not feel incidental, his presence on the touchline is part of the City dynamic, and you wonder what difference it made in those first 15 minutes of the second half when ultimately the tie was decided.
Klopp had switched Firmino and Salah, moving the Egyptian into a central role which is why he found himself in the key position to score that crucial goal. It was Salah who found Mane’s run and it was Mane who broke the defensive line, darting past Aymeric Laporte and forcing Ederson to dive at his feet.
When the ball broke loose there was still much to do but Liverpool had the right man on hand to do it.
The 39th goal of Salah’s astonishing season was taken with the usual economy of movement and deftness we have come to associate with this astonishing player.
He slipped past Ederson and took stock of Otamendi’s position sliding in front of goal, before chipping the helpless City defender.
The life drained from City, although the second was even worse,
Otamendi losing possession and Firmino finishing into the far corner, a game finished in the quiet of City’s expired hope. (© Daily Telegraph, London)