With Sunday’s 2-1 win, Manchester City has won five of the last seven League Cup finals, and eight of the last nine domestic trophies.
For something he doesn’t much care about, Pep Guardiola has a curious knack of winning the League Cup. The Manchester City manager has been open about his belief that the secondary domestic cup competition needlessly clutters the calendar, but after Sunday’s 2–1 victory over Aston Villa, he has now won it three times in a row, while City has won it in five of the last seven finals. If you include the Community Shield, as Guardiola does, City has won eight of the last nine domestic trophies.
It was not a procession of a final, which perhaps underlined what has gone awry for City this season. As City swept into a two-goal lead within half an hour, this looked like being another anti-climax, but a barely explicable error from John Stones allowed Villa back into the game. City, suddenly, while still dominating, looked a little flustered. Chances were missed, passes went astray. This is how it has been for the past few months, a team that habitually runs games through midfield finding it unable to take advantage, squandering chances and undermining itself with defensive errors.
On a weekend on which 19 in the Premier League had beaten top, and 20 had beaten third, the possibility that 18 might beat second in the Carabao Cup final seemed perhaps less outlandish than it usually would have done. And had Anwar El-Ghazi not headed a very presentable chance over after three minutes, perhaps it would have been a different story.
Perhaps. But the truth is that City was better than Villa. It is far, far better than Villa. Vast resources intelligently deployed has made it a formidable side and the majority of the Premier League simply cannot compete. That Villa found a way to make it a battle was testament to its resolve but this was a dogged, exhausting rearguard action.
The opening goal came after 20 minutes and was a classic City strike. Raheem Sterling’s advance on the left drew defenders towards him. He played the ball infield to Rodri, whose chip found Phil Foden and he headed on for Sergio Aguero to volley in via the underside of Tyron Mings’s calf.
Ten minutes later it was two. Villa will protest that the corner from which it stemmed should have been a goal kick, but still the marking was poor as Rodri stole in to head home. At that point, it seemed a matter of how many City would score, whether it would be a repeat of last season’s FA Cup final, when City put a joint-record six past Watford.
But then, from nowhere, Villa pulled one back four minutes before the break. John Stones has been a rare presence in the City side this season, his career seemingly at a crossroads as, at 25, his capacity for errors can no longer be written off as the result of his youth and inexperience. Given his chance from the start, Stones again made a notable gaffe, the sort of issue that has been undermining City all season. Under little pressure, Stones lost his balance under a dropping ball and fell over presenting possession to El-Ghazi, whose cross was powered home by the head of the Tanzania international Mbwana Samatta.
The second half was a far more open game, one that had real edge. There was a scattering of wild fouls and yellow cards, and Guardiola became so concerned that he was forced to introduce both Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva. That he had such strength available on the bench, of course, is indicative both of City’s depth and the allowances Guardiola made for a match that fell between last Wednesday’s victory away to Real Madrid and next Wednesday’s FA Cup trip to Sheffield Wednesday.
And Villa had its chance to level amid a flurry of late set-plays, Bjorn Engels’s header from an 87-minute corner being turned against the post by Claudio Bravo. But in the end, those two first-half goals proved enough, but this was a far better final than had seemed likely after half an hour. It will frustrate Villa that the decisive goal ended up resulting from such poor defending, and it will trouble City that, yet again, it ended up struggling to finish off an opponent to which it was so clearly superior.
And for everybody else, there was just the relief that this had actually been a game, that City’s win was hard-fought, and that a major final was a proper spectacle.
