Chelsea suffered the first defeat of the season at the hands of Manchester City. The Blues were condemned by a deflected effort early in the second half from the Brazilian striker. His quick turn and finish were aided by Jorginho to beat Edouard Mendy.
Actually, Gabriel Jesus’s second-half goal settled an intriguing contest at Stamford Bridge. His 53rd-minute strike was the difference between the sides. Along with it was a Romelu Lukaku goal which was ruled out for offside. He said, “We prefer to play well, so we come to play against one of the best teams in the world, European champions. They are so good and they have a lot of amazing players. We played very well and won the game. I turned good, shot, and got a little lucky but I am very happy to score that goal. The most important thing is that everyone played so well. It is not about the message, we always try to play as well as possible. We have a lot of top players to create the chances and score the goals.”
In their last three meetings prior to Saturday’s clash, Chelsea had beaten Manchester City, with the latest coming in last season’s Champions League final. The result marked Pep Guardiola’s side’s fifth clean sheet in the Premier League in a row. Thomas Tuchel said, “We lost the game and Manchester City deserved to win. Until the goal, we were very strong in the last 20 meters of the field, but only there, unfortunately. Everywhere else we were not good enough to relieve pressure and to hurt them. The performance was not complex enough. Overall, simply, we were not at our best level. After the goal it felt a little bit like the belief in winning was bigger than the fear of losing, I don’t know why. We tried to push and get the crowd behind us. It was a very emotional game but never on our highest level.”
Manchester City dominated the first half of the game. They were almost close to 70% possession for most of winning it, pressing high against Tuchel’s side. But the Chelsea defense was very strong and the sides entered the half-time level. The Manchester City finally managed to find a gap after eight minutes had gone into the second half through Jesus.
Joao Cancelo aimed with the ball and won a corner. He delivered it short and then into the box. The strike of Jesus took a slight deflection and saw it spin past Edouard Mendy. It looked like Chelsea had had it ten minutes later when Lukaku tapped the ball into the City net. But unfortunately, Kai Havertz was well offside and the referee disallowed the goal. Jack Grealish had the ideal opportunity to double the City’s leads in 82 minutes. He had the chance when he broke away for Chelsea’s defense but Mendy stood tall and saved his shot.
