This was the day when Manchester City’s walking wounded hit the wall and found themselves buried alive under a magnificent assortment of black and red bricks. Pain? Pep Guardiola can’t have known many afternoons quite like it.
They arrived battered and bruised and they left broken, stripped into tiny pieces by a side more accustomed than any to what normally happens when you scrap with the biggest kid in the yard.
Who could have ever predicted that Bournemouth, Guardiola’s most compliant punchbag, would be the team to end his 32-game unbeaten run in the Premier League? On 14 previous meetings in the top flight, City had won the lot. Pummelled them, actually, and issued the starkest lectures in how these food chains work.
And then this act of brutal and beautiful inversion happened, with the jolting upshot that City surrendered the top of the table to Liverpool just three days after exiting the Carabao Cup.
They will still talk about injuries, of course, because they have plenty of those and Guardiola has hardly been shy in flagging that up. To listen to him in recent days was to believe a Red Cross parachute drop was required, though that also invites the question of how many tiny violins might fit into one standard crate.
Antoine Semenyo powered Bournemouth ahead on a history-making day on the south coast
Manchester City were unable to overturn their opponents and kick on 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 mean there, consider the names on their team sheet. Of City’s starting XI, seven had played in the victorious Champions League final 16 months ago and an eighth, Mateo Kovacic, had won the tournament multiple times elsewhere.
They may have had knocks, aches, men playing in discomfort, but these weren’t kids scraped from the youth team. No, Guardiola had stars at his disposal, whether they were at optimal condition or not, and those players took a kicking because Bournemouth were better.
They were more intense, more organised, more committed, more incisive. They created more, they took more, they blocked more, they tackled harder. Nothing was handed out, everything was seized.
The best of them, Antoine Semenyo, scored one and played a part in the second, finished by Evanilson, but he also ripped Kyle Walker into shreds. He made him look old, both before and after Josko Gvardiol reduced the score to 2-1 late on. Walker’s beating was a sustained one.
Again, a part of that will be down to fitness – Walker was brought in for a first start in a month by necessity. But he was crushed in that duel. Just as Erling Haaland was marked into oblivion and Bernardo Silva was pressed into mistakes of the utmost rarity.
And that requires a heap of praise to go to Andoni Iraola, the orchestrator of a marvellous upset.
Iraola had lamented in these pages earlier in the week that when his side were stuffed 6-1 at the Etihad last season, they lacked ambition. They had sat back and been pelted by the storm.
On this occasion, they charged City, suffocating the spaces and going in hard. Within two minutes, they had forced a double save from Ederson, with the first stop from Semenyo decent and the second from Justin Kluivert substantially more difficult. The pressure didn’t relent.
Evanilson doubled the Cherries’ lead in the second-half as Andoni Iraola’s side held firm
Semenyo was a bright spark for the hosts who got their breakthrough within 10 minutes
Iraola’s men have climbed up to eighth in the Premier League standings after a strong showing
By the time of the goal, Phil Foden, Mateo Kovacic, Ederson and even Silva had been hassled into small errors, and then the breakthrough came with nine on the clock. Milos Kerkez was the catalyst, beating Foden on the left wing from a standing start, before pulling back to Semenyo, who stopped the ball with his back to goal on the edge of the six-yard box. Gvardiol allowed the swivel a little too easily but it was a quality turn and finish from a superb forward who won’t stay beneath the radar for long.
For Guardiola, the affiliated concern will be the regularity of these early goals – this was the fifth time across all competitions that his side has conceded within 10 minutes. The other worry will be how his side struggled to play through an aggressive press, because the failed to mount a decent chance until the half-hour mark, when Foden was blocked by Kerkez. City simply had no grip on the midfield.
When they did have any sustained time on the ball, they found no way of prising Haaland free from Illia Zabarnyi and Marcos Senesi. His involvement was non-existent, beyond the act of drilling a shot wide and rolling his own ankle in the process. He would limp through the rest of a half in which City managed no shots on goal.
The second period started the same way as the first, with Ederson scrambling to block Evanilson in a one-on-one that had been created after Semenyo skinned Walker for the umpteenth time.
Josko Gvardiol pulled one back for the visitors but Man City were unable to gain any more
Pep Guardiola cut a disappointed figure as he watched his team fail to find their equaliser
There were worrying scenes for City’s injury-stricken squad when Haaland went down injured
It set a brutal pattern for the half and continued on 63 minutes, when Semenyo spotted space behind Walker and exposed him with a clever ball to Kerkez, who coming in from on the full-back’s blind side. Kerkez’s subsequent cross was perfect, so too the timing of Evanilson’s lunge and finish in the middle.
Marcus Tavernier almost increased the humiliation, but crashed a shot against the post, and there was a sense it might prove expensive when Gvardiol headed in from Ilkay Gundogan’s cross. It was City’s first shot on goal and triggered a frenzy in the final 10 minutes – Doku and Gvardiol had chances and Haaland saw a header clawed off the line by Mark Travers. The rebound was then prodded off the post.
On another day, it might have been a story about City’s spirit in the face of adversity. Instead it was about those bricks that fell awfully hard.
