Manchester City vs Everton match report: Tim Howard holds firm as Manuel Pellegrini's men slip up again

Manchester City 0 Everton 0

Manchester City's Raheem Sterling crosses under a tackle from Everton's John Stones (Getty Images)

Suddenly, the beginnings of a class struggle are staring Manchester City in the face. As their players trudged away through the night’s relentless rain at the end of this goalless draw, they could reflect on their dominance, a performance of redemptive values by the Everton goalkeeper, Tim Howard, and the injustice of a penalty denied to them at the death.

But nothing can disguise the failure to impose themselves relentlessly in the way that aspiring champions are supposed to do.

Yaya Touré’s state of deep frustration with referee Roger East was entirely acceptable. The official was well placed as he wrongly ruled that John Stones had not fouled Raheem Sterling, when his attempt to remove his trailing leg as he slid to challenge had actually failed on the rain-slicked turf.

But the cold, hard facts of this City season are clear. Manuel Pellegrini’s side have won only four of their last nine Premier League fixtures and not managed back-to-back victories since mid-October. It was a measure of this season’s relentless unpredictability that Liverpool’s equaliser against Arsenal came after both sides had left the field here, preventing the gap to the top climbing to an uncomfortable five points. But champions generally manage to beat 11th placed sides at home, whatever their resistance, and with City nothing tends to seem certain.

There was something inauspicious about the struggle Everton and their supporters experienced simply to get their evening of football under way. Chaos on the M62 proved beyond two of the coaches laid on for the club’s supporters, which turned back after kick-off, while a car lying across the Manchester tramline removed another means of arrival. The players kicked off in a half-deserted stadium which was still being occupied half an hour in.

But Everton’s presence of mind belied their own delayed arrival. The contributions of Ross Barkley – who would have been a City player last year if Everton had not so staunchly resisted the idea with lottery number valuations – and Gerard Deulofeu both allowed the side to advance with counter-attacking pace and invention, with Romelu Lukaku so dangerous again that you wondered why on earth the Toffees have managed only one win in seven Premier League games.

Because the team struggles to defend well, is the answer. So though Lukaku piloted the side into a couple of excellent moments – first threading a ball behind Nicolas Otamendi and across the area which Barkley could not quite meet and Deulofeu drove into Joe Hart’s foot; then clipping a cross over Bacary Sagna which Leon Osman volleyed inches wide – City’s moments looked the more likely to yield a goal.

Sagna, whose game has been one of the prizes of this season for Pellegrini, levered a cross from the right which Touré was left free to head down in the six-yard area, forcing Tim Howard to redeem his reputation with a sharp, low save. Raheem Sterling and Gareth Barry looked an unhappy match-up from an Evertonian perspective, while Sergio Aguero, who looks to be regaining some of his rapier pace on this evidence, drew the best out of the impressive Muhamed Besic as he raced away on the counter attack. City’s claims that he was illegally brought down in the penalty area were wrong.

But there was something we have grown unaccustomed to seeing in Howard’s game when City lifted their efforts after the interval. There was a time in the late years of David Moyes’ Everton days when the sheer cussedness an fight of the side was formidable, squeezing five wins out of six over City from 2009 but it is a more finessed kind of Merseyside threat now. Even Roberto Martinez’s double 70th minute substitution was attack-minded, bringing Steven Piebaar and Arouna Kone into the game. It meant that City were free to drive at them, over and over.

There is no doubt that Howard was stung by the ironic cheers sent in his direction by his own supporters when taking regulation crosses in the Premier League defeats to Leicester City and Stoke City. He knows his season has been too populated by his own errors. But it was he who kept City out – twice punching clear, and impressively so when it required the best of his reflexes to repel an Aguero volley from a Kevin de Bruyne cross. Then, diving at Aguero’s feet to block his path after Tour had sent him deep into the area. Then, spreading himself once again as a delicious piece of interaction between Aguero and substitute David Silva sent the Argentine through.

There were other contributors to the Everton resistance. Stones, who offered more evidence of his comort on the ball, blocked Sterling’s sharp strike from a low De Bruyne cross. Phil Jagielka was majesterial. But all that was before the moment which will have left Pellegrini so deeply unsatisfied last night. The sliding tackle by Stones on Sterling in the penalty area had always looked high risk, given the struggle to withdraw on such a surface. Stones knee connected with the striker, though East waved City’s complaints away.

A three -point lead is inconsequential in a season such as this. Arsenal’s visit here on May 7 looks like a game of big consequences. Before then, City will require to rediscover the art string wins together. They have not managed in consecutive leave games since sweeping Newcastle and Bournemouth aside in October. No-one here needs reminding that is not good enough.