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Edin Dzeko’s ponderous play blunted the creativity of Sergio Agüero and David Silva, while Andy Carroll needs more support

Emerging from an unexpected post-Christmas hangover, Manchester City had something to prove on Tuesday night. A comfortable 3-0 victory against Liverpool put the colour back into their cheeks at the end of a holiday period in which they appeared to be having second thoughts about their ability to win the championship for the first time in 44 years.

It was one of those nights when the side who played 256 passes were rewarded with three goals while their opponents put together 511 and failed to score at all. So pronounced was City’s authority that after they went down to 10 men following the expulsion of Gareth Barry for a second yellow card, they spent the last quarter of an hour looking by far the more likely of the two sides to add to the night’s scoring.

Roberto Mancini will have welcomed this little dab on the accelerator after the bout of misfiring that saw his side fritter away a clear lead in the Premier League. Just when they looked like kicking on and taking advantage of a five-point lead over their impeccably mannered neighbours from the other side of Manchester, they faltered. The goalless draw at West Bromwich Albion on Boxing Day and the last‑minute defeat at Sunderland with which they ushered in the new year revealed a creative deficit surprising, to say the least, in a squad that cost £360m to assemble over four years since the arrival of new owners from Abu Dhabi.

Roy Hodgson and Martin O’Neill appeared to have exposed an unsuspected weakness in a team who had started the campaign by shedding last season’s dourness in favour of a more positive approach. Even when Mancini gambled with a series of attacking substitutions at the Stadium of Light, City were unable to find the cracks in a resolute Sunderland defence featuring two midfield players deployed as emergency full-backs on either side of a pair of central defenders released during the summer as superfluous to Sir Alex Ferguson’s requirements.

There was an air of staleness about City’s midfield and attack during those matches, as if they had temporarily forgotten how to surprise themselves and each other. Taking the strategic importance of the holiday programme into account, and the fact that they had given themselves the chance of protecting or even increasing a handsome lead over the reigning champions, this seemed poorly timed. Even David Silva’s effervescence seemed to have been quenched, while Samir Nasri has looked much more like the half-drowned butterfly of the second half of last season than the player whose devastatingly penetrative form for Arsenal up to Christmas 2010 persuaded City’s recruiters – and just about everyone else in English football – that he was about to become one of the Premier League’s most influential performers.

Edin Dzeko, the scorer of six goals in City’s first four league matches this season, has looked particularly ineffective more recently, his movement cumbersome and his marksmanship badly awry. Once again on Tuesday night his inclusion in a move tended to bring it swiftly to a halt, destroying the intricate, rhythmically charged interplay of Silva and Sergio Agüero. As it had against both West Bromwich and Sunderland, his £27m transfer fee appeared to be weighing as heavily on his shoulders as the £50m and £35m price tags attached to Fernando Torres and Andy Carroll.

Agüero’s opening goal would have cheered Mancini up, not so much through the shot with which Agüero deceived Pepe Reina as through the alertness with which James Milner dispossessed a sleepy Dirk Kuyt 30 yards from the Liverpool goal and the short, straight pass with which Silva fed the goalscorer, a piece of economical invention that threw the defence off balance and invited the strike.

After the interval it was disappointing to see City’s attack lapse back into the passivity of their previous two fixtures, with Dzeko’s attempts to retain possession in and around the Liverpool penalty area resembling those of a child on a Cornish beach trying to protect an ice-cream cornet against a keen-eyed seagull. The Bosnian has not scored since Bonfire night and the form of Mario Balotelli – absent with an ankle injury for the second match in a row – is likely to become increasingly important to Mancini as the title race intensifies.

With their lead virtually unchallenged after Yaya Touré had doubled the margin, City seemed almost to be waiting for the arrival of Steven Gerrard and Craig Bellamy to raise the tempo of the match and present a more worthwhile challenge. The match needed their contribution, if only to make Carroll feel less lonely. As poorly served by the crossing of Stewart Downing and Glen Johnson from the right as he had been in the 3-1 victory against Newcastle at Anfield last Friday night, Liverpool’s No9 was again attempting to feed on scraps, most of which were eagerly devoured by Vincent Kompany or Kolo Touré.

Strangely, Gerrard ignored the lessons of his own success against Newcastle, taking up a central position behind Carroll and, for the last 15 minutes, Maxi Rodríguez. Only once did he venture out to the right flank, failing to get his cross beyond the first defender while Carroll waited in vain. Given Luis Suárez’s absence for another seven matches, and the unlikelihood of Carlos Tevez ever again appearing in the colours of Manchester City, both these teams would appear to have a short-term problem in the same vital area.

Premier League 2011-12Manchester CityLiverpoolPremier LeagueRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk

Rafael Benítez might just draw hope from the way Lyon’s recent troubles have mounted up – on and off the pitch

Two days before Saturday’s derby against St Etienne, the Lyon midfielder Sidney Govou was photographed falling around drunk in a nightclub. On Friday morning the manager, Claude Puel, stripped him of the captaincy. He decided against dropping the player and soon he was to be thankful, for it was Govou who restrained the midfielder Jérémy Toulalan at half-time just as it seemed his furious team-mate was about to attack the manager.

Toulalan, normally a most placid professional, had flown into a rage after Puel ordered him to “keep it simple, stop dribbling” as the players trooped towards the dressing room. “Just because you never knew how to dribble doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it!” bawled Toulalan at the manager as Govou held him back. The scene is noteworthy for two reasons: firstly, it is amusing because Puel, a holding midfielder in the Monaco team that Arsène Wenger guided to the French title in 1988, was almost identical to Toulalan as a player. Secondly, it illustrated the pressure caused by the problems with which Lyon are having to cope as they prepare to complete their progress to the next round of the Champions League by pushing Liverpool closer to elimination on Wednesday.

Like Liverpool, Lyon have been bedevilled by injuries this season and will contest Wednesday’s tomorrow’s game without key players, all in central defence, where Toulalan is having to fill in because of the absences of Jean-Alain Boumsong, Mathieu Bodmer and Cleber Anderson.

It is true that those omissions did not prevent Lyon from winning 2-1 at Anfield two weeks ago, when Liverpool, without Fernando Torres, failed to exploit the improvised nature of Lyon’s defence even after the visitors’ one conventional centreback, Cris, had to be replaced by a 20-year-old midfielder, Maxime Gonalons. However Rafael Benítez will draw hope from the fact that modest Ligue 1 sides have in recent weeks shown that Lyon’s fragility is real. They have lost two of their last three league games, the most recent defeat a 4-1 humiliation at Nice. Even on Saturday against 17th place St Etienne, whom they ultimately beat 1-0, Lyon were ragged in the first period and could have been behind before substitute Bafétimbi Gomis’ second-half winner. No wonder Benítez is so eager for Torres to be fit.

If the home team’s travails give hope to Liverpool ahead of Wednesday, they also increase Lyon’s motivation to beat Benítez’s men. “Our result in the game at Anfield makes it more complicated for us in the sense that Liverpool have to come here and win,” said Govou. “But we hope to qualify for the next round as early as possible so that we can manage our schedule more easily before the winter break.”

Having to deploy Toulalan in defence is a double-blow for Lyon, since not only does it mean fielding a makeshift central defender who tends to get caught of position – and is not helped by the fact that 32-year-old Cris is clearly on the wane regardless of any injuries – but it also deprives Lyon of the France international’s dynamism in midfield. Only intermittently has Jean II Makoun anchored the middle as well as Toulalan normally does. With the exception of the second halves at Liverpool and St Etienne Lyon have often been unable to secure and retain possession in recent weeks. This in turn has meant they have found it hard to harness the creativity and penetrative power of offensive-minded players such as Govou, who tormented Emiliano Insúa in the second period at Anfield, 19-year-old Bosnian schemer Miralem Pjanic and the club’s two main summer recruits, Brazilian winger Michel Bastos and the barnstorming Argentinian striker Lisandro López.

All four of those players were instrumental in the swashbuckling start that Lyon made to the season, notably in the Champions League, where they crushed Anderlecht 8-2 on aggregate in the qualifiers and won 4-0 at Debrecen (though Bastos missed that), the heaviest home defeat in the Hungarian champions’ history. Lyon’s erratic form of recent weeks, however, has prompted Puel, as his instruction to Toulalan on Saturday showed, to preach a return to pragmatism over panache.

Toulalan himself is not even fully fit – he is still carrying a slight adductor strain, one of seven Lyon players to suffer with that complaint already in this campaign, prompting suggestions that Puel’s pre-season training, which involved cross-country skiing and mountain-bike climbs, was too gruelling. Benítez is not the only manager whose methods are coming under scrutiny.

Champions LeagueLyonLiverpoolRafael BenítezPaul Doyleguardian.co.uk