Manchester City Win Carabao Cup Final on Penalties

Winning the Carabao Cup for the 4th time in recent seasons was more difficult than many Manchester City fans had expected.

Sometimes as a Manchester City fan you go these games not expecting very much in the way of entertainment and this was one of those occasions when you got exactly what you expected. In my experience Cup Finals are seldom ever the place where the best football is played. They tend to be cagey affairs lit up by an unusual moment of skill.

Of course buoyed in the moment by alcohol and tired from a long journey, as a fan you get lulled into a false expectation and genuinely believe a Cup final game may be the best game ever. Sure the joy at the end is fantastic but its usually after a dirgey and scrappy game. Yesterdays game against Chelsea was much like this.

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City started brightly and it took a few moments to realise Chelsea had set up differently to the way they played at the Etihad. Then Chelsea had set up to go toe to toe with City but yesterday they were organised in a defensive formation. Keeping two strict lines of 5 when they did not have the ball and pressing in a disciplined way to restrict our time on the ball and space to run into.

City found this approach thwarted their play and instead much of the game was spent drilling the ball across rather than between the lines. In the first half at least there was some excellent movement from Bernardo, David Silva and Kevin De Bruyne as they rotated positions to try and create space and cause panic in the Chelsea defence. Despite the beauty of the movement Chelsea remained resolute and City failed to create many clear cut chances despite dominating the game.

Special mention should probably go to Chelsea for some behaviour you would probably detrimentally refer to as “professional”. Jorginho should have been carded in the first few seconds, Luiz and Rudiger could justifiably have been sent off and Kepa started time wasting within 20 minutes of kick off. Every single goal kick resulted in a long display of cleaning his boots and checking his phone before kicking it long. Like a lower league keeper in a cup game.

Laporte and Fernandinho were withdrawn through injury and it did not do much to our play. We continued to be slow and trapped between the Chelsea defensive lines looking for a way out. Given most of their defence were on yellow cards I could not understand why we were not running at them with pace daring them to catch us out.

For periods of the game Chelsea were in the ascendancy. As City ran out of steam Chelsea increasingly caught City on the break usually involving Hazard and Kante and I thought our best chance of winning this game would be on penalties. There was just time for a Chelsea breakdown as the much unloved Kepa faked injury to time waste and then faked his own substitution too just to wind the clock down.

The penalties came and there was some wonderful karma for City. Jorginho saw his shot saved. Kepa tried some mind games with Aguero and just made himself look stupid. Luiz hit the post. Sane who scored a worldy a few days ago was always going to miss. And the chance was set for Raheem Sterling to seal a win. And he did. “Top bins” he said in the interview afterwards, and he was right.

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Another trophy win at Wembley and the players deserved their moment. I hope this will set us on our journey towards retaining another title and the good thing is we get the chance to put this ambivalent performance behind us again in just a few days when we face West ham United in the Premier League.

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