This was the day when Manchester City’s walking wounded crashed into the wall and were buried alive under a magnificent array of black and red bricks. Pain? Pep Guardiola cannot have known many afternoons like this.
They arrived battered and bruised and left broken, dismembered by a side more accustomed than anyone to what normally happens when you fight with the biggest kid on the playground.
Who could have predicted that Bournemouth, Guardiola’s most docile punching bag, would be the team to end their 32-game unbeaten run in the Premier League? In 14 previous top-flight games, City had won. In fact, they beat them and gave them the harshest lectures on how these food chains work.
And then this act of brutal and beautiful reversal occurred, with the surprising result that City handed over the top of the table to Liverpool just three days after exiting the Carabao Cup.
They will continue talking about injuries, of course, because they have many and Guardiola has had no qualms about pointing it out. To hear it in recent days was to believe that it was necessary to drop a Red Cross parachute, although that also invites one to wonder how many tiny violins could fit in a standard box.
Antoine Semenyo boosts Bournemouth on historic day on south coast
Manchester City could not defeat their rival and stay at the top of the table.
Bournemouth had never beaten City in the history of their time in the Premier League
To illustrate what we might say there, consider the names on your team sheet. Of City’s starting eleven, seven had played in the victorious Champions League final 16 months ago and an eighth, Mateo Kovacic, had won the tournament several times elsewhere.
They may have had bumps, pain, and men playing awkwardly, but they weren’t kids plucked from the youth team. No, Guardiola had stars at his disposal, whether they were fit or not, and those players got a kick because Bournemouth were better.
They were more intense, more organized, more committed, more incisive. They created more, took more, blocked more, attacked harder. Nothing was handed over, everything was confiscated.
The best of them, Antoine Semenyo, scored one goal and participated in the second, finished by Evanilson, but also destroyed Kyle Walker. It made him look old, both before and after Josko Gvardiol reduced the score to 2-1 at the end. The beating Walker received was sustained.
Again, part of that will come down to fitness: Walker was brought in for his first start in a month out of necessity. But in that duel he was crushed. Just as Erling Haaland was marked for oblivion and Bernardo Silva was pressured to make errors of the greatest rarity.
And that deserves a lot of praise for Andoni Iraola, the architect of a wonderful surprise.
Iraola had lamented in these pages earlier in the week that when his team lost 6-1 at the Etihad last season, they lacked ambition. They had lain down and been buffeted by the storm.
On this occasion they charged against City, suffocating the spaces and entering with force. Within two minutes, they had forced a double save from Ederson, with Semenyo’s first save decent and Justin Kluivert’s second substantially more difficult. The pressure did not let up.
Evanilson doubled the advantage of the Cerezos in the second half against the firmness of Andoni Iraola’s men
Semenyo was a bright spark for the hosts, who broke through within 10 minutes.
Iraola’s men rise to eighth position in the Premier League standings after a good performance
At the time of the goal, Phil Foden, Mateo Kovacic, Ederson and even Silva had made small mistakes, and then came the breakthrough with nine on the clock. Milos Kerkez was the catalyst, beating Foden down the left flank from a standing start, before backtracking towards Semenyo, who stopped the ball with his back to goal on the edge of the six-yard box. Gvardiol allowed the turn too easily, but it was a quality turn and finish from a superb striker who won’t stay off the radar for long.
For Guardiola, the concern of the members will be the regularity of these first goals: this was the fifth time in all competitions that his team conceded within 10 minutes. The other concern will be how his team struggled to play through aggressive pressing, as they failed to create a decent chance until the half-hour mark, when Foden was blocked by Kerkez. City simply had no control over the midfield.
When they had sustained time on the ball, they found no way to free Haaland from Illia Zabarnyi and Marcos Senesi. His involvement was non-existent, beyond the act of drilling a wayward shot and twisting his ankle in the process. He would limp for the rest of the half in which City failed to get a shot on goal.
The second period began the same way as the first, with Ederson struggling to block Evanilson in a one-on-one that had been created after Semenyo skinned Walker for the umpteenth time.
Josko Gvardiol reduced the deficit for the visitors, but Manchester City could not gain more.
Pep Guardiola was disappointed to see his team not achieve the tie.
There were worrying scenes for the injury-hit City squad when Haaland went down injured.
It established a brutal pattern throughout the half and continued in the 63rd minute, when Semenyo saw space behind Walker and exposed him with a smart ball to Kerkez, who came in on the full-back’s blind side. Kerkez’s subsequent cross was perfect, as was the timing of Evanilson’s lunge and his shot down the middle.
Marcus Tavernier almost added to the humiliation but hit the post and there was a feeling it could prove costly when Gvardiol headed in from Ilkay Gundogan’s cross. It was City’s first shot on goal and it sparked a frenzy in the final 10 minutes: Doku and Gvardiol had chances and Haaland saw a header deflected off the line by Mark Travers. Then the rebound went into the post.
On another day, it could have been a story about City’s spirit in the face of adversity. More like those bricks that fell terribly hard.