POCH’S PARTY CRASHERS: IAN LADYMAN —
Great week for the game as Spurs and Ajax break up Euro elite
WE HAVE seen great drama at this stadium before. When Manchester City beat QPR to clinch their first Premier League title in May 2012, we went home and told everyone we had just witnessed the most dramatic end to a game of football between two English teams that we would ever see.
a box had been ticked, or so it seemed.
Do we now have to rethink that? Maybe we do, even if this one was ultimately decided by a look at television replays.
It was VAR that brought Pep Guardiola to his knees at the end, and that will never be quite the same as the sight of a ball hitting the back of the net.
It was unthinkably dramatic all the same, though, and it will perhaps take some time for City and their supporters to fully accept that another Champions League campaign has ended short of fulfilment.
a look at the wider picture tells us that this was a great night for English football that formed the centrepiece of a great week for the Champions League.
Momentarily, we should pause and think of ajax. Last month, they had the eyes of Europe on them after their magnificent 4-1 win at Real Madrid in the previous round.
as it turned out, they were in the spotlight for just 24 hours as Manchester United won dramatically at Paris Saint-Germain the very next night.
Now it has happened again, their stunning 2-1 win at Juventus overshadowed by a breathtaking night of punch and counter-punch in east Manchester.
Not that the famous Dutch club will care. They have another shot at glory in a semi-final that we now know will be played against Tottenham.
European football’s elite club competition has been accused of being a closed shop in recent times, dominated by the same faces year after year.
Barcelona remain this time but with Liverpool completing the last quartet standing, it is a wide open competition and that is what UEFA’S blue-riband club tournament really needs.
This game at the Etihad was simply a game fitting for its time, a time when standards of entertainment and glamour in the Premier League have never been higher.
The next time we wonder just why Tv companies across the world are willing to pay such vast sums to cover our game, we will look back at this for our answer.
This was a contest played under a European banner but it was English fare in character, feel and substance.
It was a silly game, a playground game. It was a game characterised and decided by mistakes, despite the quality of some of the goalscoring. Neither Pep Guardiola nor Mauricio Pochettino send their teams out to play anything like this.
They are both clever, experienced coaches and this is not what they see when they close their eyes at night.
Nevertheless, it was beautiful in its own way. The ebb and flow and unpredictability was hypnotic, and anybody who says the two VAR interventions didn’t make it even more compelling is not telling the truth.
The bald truth, a little strangely, is that Tottenham didn’t play that well. They were much better in the first leg, yet only scored once. Sometimes, that is just how sport works.
here they scored three times on the back of City mistakes. If that sounds ungenerous, then it is not meant to be.
Tottenham deserve their place in the last four for their guts in managing to stay in this tie and, we should remember, the way they fought their way back into the group stages after damaging early defeats by Inter Milan and Barcelona.
But, no, they still didn’t play particularly like they can here. For too long, Tottenham chased the game.
at no stage did they ever gain control of the midfield area, something not helped by the absence of the injured Eric Dier and the first-half problem suffered by Moussa Sissoko.
City swarmed all over their opponents at times. Kevin De Bruyne was the game’s best player by a distance. The Belgian is suddenly back to his imperious best. Raheem Sterling was also outstanding.
had City been more secure at the back, they would have won easily. But that is rather like saying that a horse would win a race if it ran faster.
The fact is that City were indeed sloppy in defence and Tottenham had enough quality in those areas to punish them.
What this does to City now will be interesting to observe. They still have a title race to contest and they will be a very strong team indeed not to carry some of this disappointment into another meeting with Tottenham here
on Saturday, this time in the Premier League.
As for Spurs, they now have a puncher’s chance of winning the Champions League and that is the wonderful thing about knockout football.
Pochettino has said that winning a trophy this season does not matter as much to him as people may think. he may now change his mind.
At the end of an unforgettable evening, Tottenham had achieved something quite special and this is a game that all but the City fans among us should take time to sit down and watch one more time on TV.
Whoever or whatever you follow, the beauty of sport is sometimes to be found in its chaos.