The temporary decline and fall of Manchester City

What was most striking about their elimination was not so much that it happened, but the way in which it did.

It wasn’t a terribly good night for either, really. Liverpool, it seems, could be having a wobble. They were hanging on by stoppage-time during their rescheduled Premier League match against Aston Villa. On top of a fairly inert performance against Wolves and The Last Goodison Merseyside Derby, the two points dropped were another little chip away at what had been starting to look like an unassailable lead at the top of the table. Should Arsenal win their game in hand, it’ll be down to five.

But while that result may or may not come to matter in three months or so’s time, it feels relatively unimportant in comparison with what occurred in Madrid last night. Primarily, in the case of Manchester City, it wasn’t so much the fact that they lost but the way in which they did so. Everybody knew that going to the Bernabeu knowing that you need to win by two goals in order to avoid at best a penalty shootout was going to be about the tallest order that could be imagined. They’d lost concentration in the first leg and paid a heavy price.

It took four minutes for the tone of the evening to be set, Kylian Mbappe taking advantage of Ruben Dias suddenly and unexpectedly taking on the properties of an umbrella in a storm to loop the ball over Thibaut Courtois. That mountain just got quite considerably higher. By half-time, it was 2-0. Mbappe completed his hat-trick just after the hour. City’s consolation goal was really no such thing.