Feed Erling Haaland and Manchester City’s totemic No 9 will score. The problem, recently, has been a paucity of openings for him. This was true again before Elliot Anderson crossed and Haaland slid home a priceless winner for Enzo Maresca’s disjointed unit, Rayan Cherki hitting a post late on.
The win ends City’s sequence of two defeats in three games yet the manager has major issues. He has to plug a leaky defence and drill his midfield to exert control. And there is a shaky Gianluigi Donnarumma: City’s goalkeeper was culpable for Ridle Baku’s first equaliser for Leipzig, as he was for Nicolas Jackson’s winner in the recent defeat at Aston Villa, plus two more in the Paris Saint-Germain loss last month.
The manager said: “It’s not a concern but it’s a mistake. But in 48 hours [Saturday] we have Nottingham Forest away, we need to be focused on that and then in the international break I will look. At the moment I’m not thinking about the goalkeeping situation.
Gigio knows he was not good with the first goal.” He was honest, too, about Antonio Nusa’s second for Leipzig, the forward taking advantage of a lax rearguard. Still, after going down against Villa and Brighton in the Premier League, the win is a certifiable tonic ahead of the Forest trip. City’s quest to return to victorious ways featured an XI of four changes from Saturday’s Brighton reverse.
Noteworthy was Maresca’s dropping of Rúben Dias as Abdukodir Khusanov’s pace was preferred at centre-back to the captain, Haaland taking the armband. While the 2,000-plus travelling support were stationed in a quadrant to the right of Donnarumma’s goal, the noise came from the congregation behind Maarten Vandevoordt’s where a sea of red and white bounced to the tempo of a booming drum. They could roar particularly loud when Nusa flitted across City’s D and unloaded, and what should have been a regulation save for Donnarumma became a fumble – and corner for Leipzig.
As can be with this Maresca side, control was difficult to find and administer for any prolonged passage: Phil Foden twice lost the ball when turning into traffic was no aid, the second time meaning Nusa could zigzag towards goal. The Brighton defeat featured close to zero service for Haaland and City’s 13-goal man was again hard to find, Matheus Nunes’s loose cross, when the captain lurked, emblematic. So, too, as a sign of Leipzig’s ascendancy, was Marc Guéhi scrambling to clear danger, Nusa firing in the ball from the left, and Christoph Baumgartner having space to shoot marginally wide of Donnarumma’s left post.
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