MANCHESTER CITY have beaten Chelsea 4-2 in a pre-season friendly in the United States.
Pep Guardiola’s men took the lead through goal machine Erling Haaland’s third-minute penalty.
Seconds later, the Norweigan bagged his second, rifling past Robert Sanchez in the Chelsea goal.
Early in the second half, it went from bad to worse for Enzo Maresca’s men after Oscar Bobb made it 3-0 before Haaland got his hat-trick on 56 minutes.
Raheem Sterling’s close-range thunderbolt pulled one back for Chelsea on the hour mark.
In the 89th minute, Noni Madueke converted to make it 4-2 to take the shine off City’s dominance.
After the promise of Wednesday’s performance, Chelsea hit the reset button back down to zero at the start of this game, with two horrendously cheap and poor giveaways gifting two goals to Erling Haaland inside of six minutes. (Haaland’s penalty may not have been a penalty in fairness, but that doesn’t make our play any better.)
City dialed back the pressure after that lightning start, but whenever they did dial it back up, we continued to struggle to play out the back. Getting pressed into the simplest of mistakes by City’s B/C-team (+Haaland) isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring. Our passing patterns certainly didn’t cause them any surprises.
Meanwhile at the other end, whatever shape Enzo Maresca intended to get out the starting XI — Gusto left wing? Where was KDH playing? Lavia, Caicedo, AND Enzo? — was either not working as intended, or simply not working well. At all. City’s B-side did give us a gift towards the end of the half, but Enzo Fernández missed the empty net.
Madueke and Sterling coming on at the half (for a very poor Caicedo and even poorer Mudryk) improved the team’s shape and coherence — back to more like what had been seeing this summer — but City also came out with renewed impetus and inside of the half’s first ten minutes, once again hit us for a couple — including Haaland completing his hat-trick. Turnovers in midfield and our own defensive third continue to plague this team and these tactics.
Raheem Sterling got one back with a thumping finish soon after, but it proved little more than consolation.
The final 20 minutes was a bit of a Sunday League affair, with neither side worried about shape or personnel or tactics or anything as boring as that. And while both teams wasted quality looks, at least that part was entertaining, and Madueke bagged a nice one at the end, too, against Scott Father Time Carson.
