Huddersfield 0 Manchester City 3: Easy Win for City
By David Crook
When the statistics are recorded for this season, Manchester City fans will mostly forget the drab performance throughout much of this match and will instead remember we won by 3 clear goals away from home, when the pressure was on to close the gap at the top of the table.
This was one of those matches where City were not at their scintillating best. They had too many passes which went astray, the pace through the midfield was pedestrian and the general play in the first half in particular was lackadaisical at best. It was as though the City side knew they did not have to be at their flowing best in order to beat Huddersfield, so conserved their energy.
The early exchanges in the game were dominated by a Kongolo foul on Sterling in the penalty area, which much to the amazement of everyone was waved away. Quite how the referee Andre Marrinner deemed the tackle was not a foul was a mystery. City were still smarting from this poor decision when Danilo crashed in the first goal.
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Danilo hit a speculative shot from the edge of the penalty area which took a deflection past the Huddersfield goalkeeper. The big surprise was that this did not spur City onto greater things, instead they laboured and toiled.
Within ten minutes of the restart for the second half the match was all over. City seemed to be a side who had been reminded of their duties by Pep Guardiola during his half time team talk. There was a renewed energy in the first 20 minutes of the second half and most of it was routed through Leroy Sane.
The second goal came from some smart interplay between Sane and Sterling. Sterling continued his run into the centre of the attack and Sane fired over a cross which Sterling headed in. The third goal came within another two minutes as Sane was released by Aguero and took his chance smartly and calmly.
Once the lead had been reached City went back down through the gears and coasted. In fact there was a new kind of City on display here during the game management. City let Huddersfield have the ball, let them pass the ball sideways and only kicked into action when the ball moved forwards. Even in fourth gear City were toying with their opponent.
Winning when not being at your best is an important asset for any side with title aspirations, but it is also important to be able to step back up the intensity again when required. We can only hope this will be the case, as Chelsea and Arsenal fixtures begin to loom on the horizon. There will be many harder tests ahead for City if they really are to compete on four fronts but sometimes the real measure of a side is winning badly.