Manchester City 2-1 Leeds United: Countdown
If there was a win for Leeds in Manchester it was the swift application of new, ugly ideas and, more importantly, ninety-five minutes of head-retention.
There has been a lot of debate in recent seasons about football and the clock, the impact of time-wasting and the allocation of stoppage time. Ninety minutes has not meant ninety minutes for a long time. How long should a game of football be?
On Saturday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola had fifteen minutes in mind. Because his new opponent, Sam Allardyce, has been out of football for two years and had only been working with his new players for three days, Guardiola had no data on what Leeds United might do. “Always [there is an] impact [of] a new manager on the players for the first one or two games,” he said. “Every team [is] playing for important things. We don’t have any info on what system they are going to play. We will need fifteen minutes to adapt.”
Allardyce wasn’t thinking even that far ahead. “I’m very interested in the first ten minutes,” he told Sky Sports before the game. “The first ten minutes is going to tell me an awful lot about how we are going to be today. And if that’s a positive start I will feel a bit more comfortable. The last thing we want to do is concede a goal, in any period, but particularly in the first ten minutes.”
In the end, the end didn’t come until minute 95, although it should all have been over long before then. And the two managers’ pre-match assessments had things about right. Leeds did not concede in the first ten minutes. But after fifteen minutes, Manchester City had worked Leeds out. By the nineteenth minute İlkay Gündoğan scored, after Riyad Mahrez beat Junior Firpo and pulled the ball back to the unmarked midfielder on the edge of the area. Eight minutes later Gündoğan scored the same goal again, only changing which corner he shot into. Fifteen minutes to adapt, fifteen minutes to settle the match, half an hour of a game, thank you all for coming or tuning in, enjoy the rest of your day.
It wasn’t quite that simple. Erling Haaland of Leeds was in a weirdly barndoor mood, hitting shots against the post, the crossbar, and wide, and over; heading at the goalie or even letting the ball hit his standing foot and tripping himself up when he should have scored. Guardiola went mad at Haaland when, with six minutes left, he let Gündoğan hit a decisive penalty off Joel Robles’ fingertips and the post after Pascal Struijk had clumsied through Phil Foden’s legs. Guardiola was assuming it had been a sentimental choice to let Gündoğan score a hat-trick. Perhaps it was — in Salzburg, Jesse Marsch had to stop Haaland letting other players take penalties, when it was Erling’s way of helping his teammates get in on the goalscoring. But maybe, this time, Haaland just didn’t fancy it, not with the day he was having, not with his secret wish to swap the sky-blue shirts of Manchester for, well, probably not the Black & Decker works team kit Leeds were wearing this time, but a Leeds shirt in general.