Manchester City’s Champions League ambitions took another massive hit on Wednesday as they crashed to a 2-1 loss at home to an average – but still infinitely better – CSKA side on one of the most embarrassing days for years. City had two players sent off in front of a hostile atmosphere comprised of Blues and ban-defying CSKA fans.
The starting lineup for City was unchanged from the one that beat United in Sunday’s Manchester derby. Mangala returned to the bench after missing the weekend’s game with an injury he picked up. Aleksandar Kolarov was also absent from the squad, having been ruled out for a month.
It took just two minutes for City’s misery to begin, when Seydou Doumbia powered in thanks to some very poor marking that left him free to put a header past the helpless Joe Hart. It left the Etihad in a stunned silence, with that goal going against the masterplan of beating CSKA and somehow qualifying for the next round. Not much can be said about the first goal other than the fact that it’s all too typical of the City strategy of defending set pieces.
Six minutes later, the Blues were back in it and it looked like they’d go on to get something from the game when Yaya Touré put one of his trademark free-kicks past Igor Akinfeev to level the scores. Whilst on most days City would kick on from that and go on to score three or four, they barely improved and despite the huge amount of possession their pedestrianism got them nowhere as they struggled to break down a resilient CSKA Moscow defence.
Their failure to capitalise on the goal cost City on 34 minutes, when Seydou Dombia regained the lead for the visitors after a bad mistake by Clichy. Just when it looked like the danger had been cleared, Clichy’s short pass was easily intercepted, and played to Doumbia, who did well to slot it past Joe Hart into the back of the net. Again, the defence will need to seriously be looked at; that goal probably shouldn’t be happening at any level, least of all this high up.
Despite there not being any more goals, it only got worse for the English champions. Samir Nasri and Fernandinho both came on as half-time substitutes to try and change the game, but Nasri was cut out easily, isolated out wide whilst Fernandinho couldn’t do what he does best in midfield.
However Fernandinho made City’s chances of a recovery even slimmer on 70 minutes, when he was sent off for two yellow cards. Whilst the first was avoidable, the second came after Demichelis dove in and left himself out of position, and Fernandinho almost had to foul just to break up player and allow Demichelis need to get back in position; unfortunately it cost him his place on the pitch as City went down to 10.
Twelve minutes later, Yaya was the second player to see red for a bad foul on Eremenko. After the Ivorian lost the ball on what wasn’t one of his best nights, he got frustrating and pushed Eremenko to the ground hard, which resulted him receiving his marching orders. Whilst partially understandable, Pellegrini won’t be happy to lose one of his star midfielders for two very important Champions League games in the next month or so.
After the second yellow City started to play more freely, yet struggled to exploit any space in the CSKA team due to only having nine men; regardless, it’s too late to start playing after 82 minutes of the game. There’ll be a lot of thinking going on at the training ground tomorrow, with Pellegrini possibly thinking about a change in system in order to salvage something from this season. Wednesday night won’t go down well in City memories, but we can’t dwell on it, we need to pick ourselves up and focus on the league, with European competition almost certainly gone now.
