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, beaten into tiny pieces by a side more accustomed than any to what normally happens when you dance with brutes.
Who could have ever predicted that Bournemouth, Guardiola’s most compliant punchbag, would be the side to end their 32-game unbeaten run in the Premier League? This being the club that has lost every single one of their 14 top-flight fixtures against City to the quite remarkable aggregate of 45-7.
But this was the occasions when those two streaks ended, with the upshot that City surrendered the top of the table to Liverpool and had no recourse to argue the injustices.
They will 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 invited 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 and aches, but these weren’t kids scraped from the youth team.
They had enough of their big boys for a scrap, whether they were at optimal condition or otherwise. And those big boys took a kicking. Bournemouth won because Bournemouth were better. They were more intense, more organised, more committed, more incisive. They created more, they took more. Nothing was handed out.
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.
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 in mistakes. 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 bravery. Ambition. They sat back and were 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.
By the time of the goal, Phil Foden, Mateo Kovacic, Ederson and even Bernardo Silva had been hassled into small errors, and then the breakthrough came. 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 forward who won’t stay beneath the radar for long.
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
Guardiola, so miffed that he returned to seat, wouldn’t see his side muster a decent chance until the half-hour mark, when Foden was blocked by Kerkez. City simply had no grip on the midfield, which was as much a consequence of Bournemouth’s intensity as it was their own physical limitations.
When they did have any sustained time on the ball, limited as it was, they found no way of prising Erling 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 and had no grip on the midfield.
The second period started the same as the first, with Ederson scrambling to block Evanilson in a one-on-one that had been created by the repetition of an established theme – Semenyo catching Walker out of position. It would happen over and again.
City stabilised long enough for Foden to miss a good opportunity, but the second dagger then went in on 63 minutes. Semenyo was again involved, spotting the space left by Walker and the run of Kerkez on the full-back’s blind side, before threading through ball into the channel.
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
Kerkez’s cross was perfect, so was the timing of Evanilson’s lunge, and the forward routed the finish past Ederson. Far harder than it looked in a game that was proving easier than anyone expected.
Marcus Tavernier almost increased the humiliation, but crashed a shot against the post, and there was a sense it might prove expensive.
That started when Gvardiol headed in from Ilkay Gundogan’s cross and then the bedlam of what followed in the frenzy of the final 10 minutes. There were good openings for Doku and Gvardiol, and the one Haaland had wanted all day, when he had a header four yards out. When that was clawed off the line by Mark Travers, the Norwegian then prodded the loose ball against 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 hard.
