Jamie’s report: Man City 2-2 Fulham

Our man in the North was at Eastlands on Sunday:

Man City 2-2 Fulham

A crazy match, as our trips to Eastlands always seem to be. The common factor, of course, is the home side: City’s star-studded ranks play with such abandon – committed to attack despite leaving generous space behind – that it seems Hodgson’s normally conservative outfit can’t help but join in the fun. This was another end-to-end thriller, and great entertainment again.

City had the better of the first half. Adebayor, save for his needless attempts at conning the referee, lead the line impressively, whilst Tevez tormented our full-backs with mesmeric, magnetic dribbles without ever quite producing an end product. Their best chance fell to Nigel De Jong, who found himself with a shooting opportunity after a fortunate deflection but was denied by Schwarzer. Later, Richards seemed unlucky to have a headed effort ruled out for a foul.

At the other end Fulham were creating openings too. Baird and Greening both saw decent shots whistle wide, whilst the chance of the half fell to Diomansy Kamara who was slipped through nicely by Zamora, only to take a heavy touch and see the ball smothered by Given. A bad miss, by anyone’s standards.

Worse was to come. With the second period only a few minutes old, Kamara made one of his typical runs: seeming to go nowhere but suddenly, randomly getting past a couple of players and opening things up. From the left, he fed a lovely pass into Dempsey, whose shot was parried by Given into the path of Zamora – four yards out, with all the time in the world and the goal gaping. He blazed over.

City then struck twice in quick succession – a scrappy goal from a corner (disappointing, and the set-piece consolations are mounting up this season) followed by a nicely worked effort from Petrov after exchanging passes with Gareth Barry (perhaps Greening went to ground too easily here). Zamora, as the saying goes, must have wanted the ground to swallow him up.

But to Bobby’s credit, he kept going – continuing what was in fact his third impressive performance of the week, shocking miss aside. Almost immediately after Petrov’s strike, it was Zamora’s chest-down from Kelly’s ball in which allowed Damien Duff to screw a shot past Given and put us back in the game, at 2-1.

Amazingly, within minutes we were level. Greening sent a free-kick into the box where Demspey bundled it in like only Dempsey can – heading slowly, precisely, agonizingly into the corner of the net under seemingly impossible pressure from his marker. Bedlam and incredulity in the away end – reminiscent of the great escape’s greatest game, two seasons ago. “We’ve come from two down, we’ve come from two do-o-own, it must be City, we’ve come from two down…”
All this and there were still 25 minutes remaining. From this point it could have gone either way: our best chance came when Zamora turned powerfully past Toure before shooting wide, whilst City had a succession of corners in the closing minutes as we continued our habit of sitting too deep with a result in sight.

No matter, on this occasion: finally, the whistle blew and it was over. Somehow, despite the unlikely comeback, it felt disappointing. What if our strikers had put their early chances away? Still – a point not to be sniffed at, and after the trip to West Ham, a second very entertaining away game in a row. Compared to last year’s travels, this is vintage stuff. Next stop: Rome!