Silva inspires five-star City to hit the heights
If the season had gone according to Pep Guardiola’s masterplan then there would have been more days at the Etihad Stadium that would have looked like this, with David Silva pulling the strings and an opponent beaten with an avalanche of goals.
Silva left to a standing ovation after 67 minutes having scored the first and run the show on his return from two games away with an ankle injury. He breezed back into the side to show everyone how it was done, and the scale of the victory enabled Guardiola to make a point about the problems that have plagued his side until now.
It has been his team’s finishing that had let him down so far, Guardiola said. “I can remember just one game when the other team created more chances, that was away to Tottenham. Any other game? No chance. We are better than all teams in Premier League home and away [at creating chances], even against the next champions, Chelsea.
“We created more chances but in the box we are not good … in football, basketball, tennis, the most important thing is to do it [score]. Against Everton we lost 4-0 and they had four chances. We had more. Football at the highest level, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, they create enough chances. They have guys who score goals. We have missed that a lot this season. We have a high quality and at the right moment [against Crystal Palace], we scored goals.”
It was delivered with Guardiola’s customary zeal and you got some insight into the kind of season he envisaged as opposed to the one that has transpired. Every time his flow slowed down he would remember another game when his side had created more chances, “United! We arrived 19 times and we didn’t score a goal.”
For all his firmly held beliefs in the way to play, it seems that the changeability of the English game is also something Guardiola has absorbed.
He said he told his players at halftime, “If you arrive in the last 20 minutes of the team with the score just 1-0 against Crystal Palace then we don’t win the game. I said to the players ‘Score a [second] goal or we don’t win’”.
As for Sam Allardyce, he went as far as to say that the second half, after Vincent Kompany scored a second, was, in his words “a bit of a capitulation”. “For me it is very hard to take what I saw today,” Allardyce said. “Lose? Yes. But lose like that? No. Unacceptable.” He said that his players had managed to regroup after the first goal but when they conceded a second at the beginning of the second half they were far too open.
“We fell into the same trap at the start of the second half and after that it was a bit of a capitulation, which was a disappointment given what we have achieved. From my point of view all five goals could have been avoided if we defended properly.”
Hull and Swansea were yet to play when Allardyce gave his press conference but he said that he wanted to remove any relegation fears by beating the former at Selhurst Park a week on Sunday. “I want to win that one,” Allardyce said. “I don’t want to have to rely on other people slipping up.”
This was the same club who had beaten Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool in the course of last month, albeit not the same team, and without the injured Mamadou Sakho, James Tomkins, Scott Dann and Yohan Cabaye they looked vulnerable. The first goal, after 114 seconds, was a dreadful defensive mistake for which Martin Kelly will take most of the blame but which should have been stopped earlier.
Kelly had to clear Sterling’s cross and the defender’s weak header fell right to the feet of Silva who volleyed one in from 10 yards with the ease of a man posting a letter. “The big, big clubs,” Guardiola said, “when they are close to their opponent’s box, the top players don’t lose the ball. “Maybe they dribble well, maybe badly, a good cross but they don’t lose the ball. David is one of them.” There were times when City were magnificent and not just Silva. There was Leroy Sané too, picking his way through challenges with his fast feet. Yet Palace had one good first-half
chance with the score at 1-0 when Christian Benteke’s header from Andros Townsend’s cross was pushed around the post by Willy Caballero.
Allardyce said that his team should never have gone chasing the deficit until the late stages of the game and instead concentrated on keeping it at 1-0. Yet they made the same mistake at the start of the second half. Kelly let Kompany drift away from him, and instead marked Yaya Touré, while Kevin De Bruyne picked out his team-mate perfectly from the right and the City captain met the ball first time to score.
De Bruyne had hit the bar already from a free-kick when he scored the third. His right-foot shot from Gabriel Jesus’s lay-off was close enough to Wayne Hennessey for him to save but the goalkeeper did not get a hand to it. Sterling scored from Pablo Zabaleta’s knockdown. Nicolás Otamendi’s goal was a nicely-judged diving header from De Bruyne’s free-kick and the home crowd saw five goals in a home league game for the first time this season.