City and Leeds in need of urgent repairs
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Manchester City 0 Leeds United 0
If nothing else, this match had profound implications for comedians. No longer can Manchester City be held up and compared unfavourably to the points of a toothpick. Now they use a triangle instead.
A red triangle in all probability, the sort that motorists use to warn of a breakdown, although for which team at Maine Road on Saturday is debatable. City are ascending from hopeless, but only those with sky blue spectacles would describe them as anything other than poor while Leeds are declining in an alarming manner.
A month ago West Yorkshire did not have to stretch its collective imagination too much to forsee a championship at Elland Road. Now medoicrity seems to be creeping up on them, with only the cup competitions for light relief. Even Tony Yeboah seems to have been ejected from Mount Olympus and has not scored for four matches, an unprecedented run of failure for Leeds.
To be fair, he had barely a chance here thanks to a combination of Kit Symons' expert shepherding and Leeds' emphasis on defence. This was their first clean sheet of the season and, after shipping eight goals in two matches in the previous eight days, it was manager Howard Wilkinson's priority - something that will be emphasised by the pounds 1m signing of Oldham's Richard Jobson today."
Wilkinson drew consolation from that and the fact that his team had created the best two chances - Palmer's 30-yard shot that Eike Immel tipped away from the top corner and Gary McAllister's point-blank 74th minute header that he inexplicably put over - but he acknowledged the small size of those trophies. "I can't say anything more about that game," he concluded, "except bullshit."
City, meanwhile, began to look as though Alan Ball's optimism might not belong entirely to cloud cuckoo land after all. There was the first real flowering of Georgi Kinkladze's skills while Nicky Summerbee epitomised the growing confidence in the side with his best performance of the season.
They might have won this match if the referee had shared the opinion of most of the ground that John Pemberton had brought down Keith Curle in the area after 59 minutes. Ball said the television evidence seemed to support the view but the City captain, mirroring Wilkinson's honesty, admitted later that he had taken a touch too many and there had been no foul.
"It's coming," Ball said of the performance. "Slowly, but it's coming." And he was not talking bullshit, either.
Manchester City (4-4-2): Immel; Edghill, Curle, Symons, Phelan (Creaney, 86); Summerbee, Lomas, Flitcroft (I Brightwell, h-t), Kinkladze; Quinn, Rosler. Substitute not used: Margetson (gk).
Leeds United (4-5-1): Lukic; Kelly, Wetherall, Pemberton, Worthington; Deane, Palmer, McAllister, Couzens, Wallace (Whelan, 81); Yeboah. Substitutes not used: Beesley, Tinkler.
Referee: M Bodenham (East Looe).
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