One of our best performances of the season.

Yup. On the whole offside / interfering with play thing, a couple of seasons ago Webb said a City goal that had been ruled out for Akanji being offside shouldn’t have been. His rationale actually indicated a seismic shift in how such judgements are made and it passed entirely without comment.

So - just to be clear - you are saying that the level of contribution that Isak has made so far at Liverpool will remain consistent and not improve for the entirety of his time there? That’s what you’re saying? Because if it isn’t, whatever it is you are saying is irrelevant to the point I’m making

This is where I get frustrated that the person cross examining* him is Michael Owen. It’s such a wasted opportunity. Have someone who is actually going to interrogate what he says and give it some scrutiny.

Not making judgements based one extended stint of injury from three years ago isn’t a failure to do due diligence.

I mean it’s note the point, the point is that he hasn’t had a run in the side so it’s too early to make judgements about how much he will contribute to their attacking focus, but for clarity missed four games last season and eight the season before…

I think this is one where Howard Webb is going to tell us they got wrong in about a month’s time.

Yeah look, I don’t want to make a big deal of this, I just feel like you’re making a bit much from a tiny sample size far too early in the season. Isak isn’t even fit. If Mo is still holding them up week in, week out come April, maybe then they have need to start being concerned.

I’m not a big one for making direct comparisons between instances because there’s always small differences that make them not directly comparable.

What I’d like is an explanation of exactly how the officials judged Robbo affected Donnarumma’s ability to play the ball.

But you’re talking about one game. Which, as I said, is only significant if you expected their lesser reliance on him to be evident in every single match. There’ll naturally be games where he’s the primary threat and others where he isn’t.

Fair point

I think we’re at a stage now where we shouldn’t be thinking about the big prizes. We should just be thinking about the next game. When you’re as successful as we have been in recent seasons it’s easy to forget that that’s how most fans experience the sport.

Yeah. The performance was disappointing (especially coming off two good shows against Villa and Madrid) but losing at the Etihad is in and of itself not a big deal.