How do you replace the irreplaceable? The news that Manchester City would be without Erling Haaland until the end of the month, extending his availability spell to up to two months, was the kind of blow that would leave almost any club reeling, but as usual this time, it wasn’t to be.
If you sometimes get the feeling that Pep Guardiola enjoys setting up a challenging jigsaw puzzle for his bright sparks, then it’s as if Kevin De Bruyne has had enough of all kinds of navel-gazing as he greedily lines his pockets in his first Premier League minutes since August. “After five months he is not ready for 90 minutes but his mind is fresh,” Guardiola emphasized. The often inscrutable playmaker was the last to leave the field amid hugs and applause from his players and staff, with a smile as wide as the Tyne Bridge.
Relating to: Bobb completes classic comeback as Manchester City deny Newcastle
City’s current personnel predicaments have already been put into perspective by Newcastle chief executive Darren Eales and Eddie Howe, while openly discussing their club’s ongoing financial fair play difficulties this week, with much fear-mongering about the possibility of a current mainstay or two being sacrificed was seated. The home bench, which includes strong players such as Matt Ritchie, Paul Dummett and two goalkeepers, has been a sign of an empty cupboard for some time, and De Bruyne, in tracksuit form at kick-off, single-handedly underlined clearly how far Newcastle are from City. But next year it may be successful.
There had been a few hints earlier that Guardiola might be considering a short-term solution to his problem, particularly in a few instances in the first half when Josko Gvardiol unexpectedly emerged from the centre-back position. However, the opening moments of a match at St James’s Park, when the deafening music from the public address system gives way to a cacophony of local enthusiasm, is rarely a place to collect one’s thoughts.
Newcastle, who remain a force of nature at home, are the Premier League’s consummate disruptors and they certainly destabilized the champions’ stability early on. The strange start to this game, with Ederson unflinchingly attempting to follow on after being destroyed by Kyle Walker and limping in his own half to almost gift the home team a goal, gave the first impression of fragility and added fuel to the Newcastle fire.
But while Paris Saint-Germain in October, for example, struggled to recover from the first half of St James’s spin cycle, City appeared to have emerged from their own tumble here dry, wrinkle-free and softened. They worked diligently with the ball, knowing that there could be no shortcuts without their Norwegian talisman. The first moment of Gvardiol’s occasional Haaland imitation was at the end of a particularly lovely passing movement from left to right, where his shot was blocked by the perpetual forest of bodies that Newcastle doggedly defended. City’s opening goal quickly followed and the finesse of Bernardo Silva’s finish past Martin Dubravka showed just how comfortable they were in the bear pit.
But City, playing high up the pitch as if they were chasing the game rather than controlling it, found themselves in space behind Walker twice in as many minutes, and their laziness (and the space behind Kyle Walker) was punished with successive penalties: Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon equally They finish well. Despite the genesis of Isak’s equalizer – a bone-crushing challenge from Fabian Schär on Jérémy Doku – there was no sense that City were not ready for the physical side of it. But this failure arguably prevented them from moving forward.
As the eight minutes of stoppage time added for Ederson’s misfortune faded away, there was a feeling the visitors could do with half-time not to regroup but to give Rodri a cold shower. Bruno Guimarâes.
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Guardiola’s men regained their collective composure after the break, but this time they faced an intense and well-tuned defence. It’s time to rethink and have someone other than the coach do it. When De Bruyne left the bench and headed straight for a free-kick, the silence in the stands betrayed the anxiety of his arrival. It was a false alarm as the Belgian’s shot came off the wall, but the match could still have ended in a goal if Julián Álvarez had not flared up in the ensuing panic. The reprieve was temporary, De Bruyne slotting the equalizer into the corner with authority.
Few better passes could have been imagined but somehow he found one for Oscar Bobb’s winner and he told us that months of inactivity had fired his imagination, a player with a different sense of geometry than almost any footballer on the planet. “You just hope he’s rusty and not up to full speed yet,” Eddie Howe sighed, “and then he comes along and does this.” Why would Guardiola plan for life without Haaland when he has the intelligence to design it for himself?