Manchester City edged Liverpool in a five-goal thriller on Thursday night to book a place in the Carabao Cup quarter-finals as both teams played their first competitive football since mid-November.
Erling Haaland and Riyad Mahrez twice gave City the lead, but each time the advantage was cancelled out by Liverpool equalisers from Fabio Carvalho and Mohamed Salah respectively. But there was to be no answer to Nathan Ake’s 58th minute winner.
The first clear sight of goal went the way of the visitors when Haaland raced clear down the right and put the ball on a plate for Cole Palmer in the middle. But the youngster got his angles all kinds of wrong and miscued well wide of the target from close-range.
Liverpool were struggling to gain any sort of foothold and were quickly punished by Haaland, who capitalised where Palmer floundered by meeting Kevin De Bruyne’s cross ahead of Joe Gomez.
The equaliser came relatively out of the blue, although Darwin Nunez had hit the post from an offside position. It was made possible when Joel Matip drove forward from the back. City then didn’t do enough to close down James Milner and it was an easy finish for Carvalho.
That goal initially knocked the stuffing out of City, but they squandered two glorious chances to re-take the lead before half-time. Both were the product of De Bruyne crosses from the right and twice Caoimhin Kelleher saved, once with his foot from Ilkay Gundogan and soon after pushing away a header from Ake. Great saves, but the City players at least gave him a chance.
In a flying start to the second half, both teams had scored within three minutes of the restart. First, Mahrez put a clinical finish beyond Kelleher after a sumptuous first touch on the right-hand side of the box set himself to fire low across the goal. But only moments had passed before Salah made it 2-2, a tap-in from a Darwin Nunez square pass after he had been released down the left.
Just shy of the hour mark, Liverpool made the mistake of giving De Bruyne far too much time to cross. His curling ball from the left after a short corner was too perfect and there was no way that Ake could miss with his head at the far post, especially given the City overload.
Nunez, having earlier laid on Salah’s goal, was poor in front of goal himself. Midway through the second half he pulled a great chance from the right wide of the far post, by then his third similar chance of the night and all of which were off target.
Tempers threatened to boil over…
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