Photograph: David Klein/Reuters
James Maddison had been jogging up and down the touchline with increasing purpose, eyes darting ever more frequently towards the technical area, for at least five minutes when the call finally came. A match that had rarely risen above a low hum was 72 minutes old and needed something, someone. Tottenham’s support had barely known him for three months, and only for 11 competitive games, when he injured his ankle in November. The din that greeted his return to the pitch said plenty about the dizzying romance all parties had plunged into last summer.
The stage might have been set for a swift resumption of the love affair but Manchester City had already called upon a comeback king who changes games as readily as mere mortals breathe. Kevin De Bruyne has not started a match for five and a half months and was not deemed ready to be pitched in here, instead making a third substitute appearance since his hamstring troubles cleared. While Maddison strained to meet Ange Postecoglou’s line of sight, Pep Guardiola calmly unloaded the most potent weapon he could deploy. It was De Bruyne who injected the attacking penetration that City, for all their weaved patterns and half-chances to shoot, had lacked for more than an hour and ultimately his influence picked the lock.
Related: Nathan Aké’s late winner ends Manchester City’s blank run at Spurs
This had always felt like a night defined by players outside the starting XI. Son Heung-min headed Tottenham’s list of regulars waylaid by international tournaments or injury; Erling Haaland’s continued absence from City’s ranks requires little elaboration. The loss of such critical components, with their urgency, physicality and class, was always going to dilute the fare on offer here. The presences of Maddison and De Bruyne on their respective benches did, at least, promise to enrich it.
When De Bruyne, given the game’s best chance after Pierre-Emile Højbjerg had been pickpocketed by Phil Foden, shot wide in the 82nd minute the thought occurred that rust may take longer to shake off at 32. De Bruyne had turned things on their head in his previous outing, at Newcastle, but perhaps the old rhythm was not quite tuned in.
But he had already stepped up City’s tempo, contesting a shoulder charge with Micky van de Ven near the right touchline and darting beyond the home midfield. There was even time to help Cristian Romero out with a spot of cramp but the coup de grace came via a corner, dropped teasingly into the six-yard box, from which Guglielmo Vicario’s fumble allowed Nathan Aké to convert. It was City’s first goal at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium: De Bruyne had wrought another small moment of history for his collection, which inevitably clumps those into significantly bigger ones.
“He made an exceptional corner on the right spot,” Guardiola said of De Bruyne. “I want to protect him. You always understand he’s going to create in these types of game at the end, when it’s a little bit more open.”
De Bruyne had shown how it is done. With the score still goalless Maddison, dropping deep, had slid a neat pass through to Destiny Udogie that did not quite yield an opening.
At that point there was the sense these two creative forces might spend the latter stages matching each other blow for blow, feathered slide-rule pass for sinuous swerve through the thirds. But it was Oliver Skipp, who arrived alongside Maddison, who brought the loudest home applause with a daring turn and burst inside his own half shortly before Spurs’s fate was sealed. Maddison, a character who revels in meeting the moment, had to settle for that starchiest of contemporary football buzz phrases: minutes in the legs.
He will benefit from them, and so will Spurs. This was probably their bluntest showing under Postecoglou, the best of their minimal attacking threat coming when Brennan Johnson toe-ended Timo Werner’s pass into a smothering Stefan Ortega. It just about counted as a shot, sparing them the most unseemly of blanks. There was little cajolement from further back and none of the midfield drive Pape Sarr, away with Senegal, might have offered. Perhaps it was asking too much for Maddison to bring both the intensity and craft Tottenham required in a cameo showing.
There had been a view that, should Spurs find a way past City here, the FA Cup might open up for them. Arsenal have already fallen, Chelsea or Villa will go out, and Liverpool may find weightier fish to fry. At their freewheeling best, Postecoglou’s side should be manna from Cup-tie heaven. This time a weakened lineup was, as their manager admitted, too passive and rarely looked like seizing any measure of control.
Maddison, of course, has a winner’s medal to his name with Leicester. It is mildly surprising to recall that De Bruyne has won only two. But it is the Belgian who will be primed to increase his tally after proving he, and nobody else, was the man this tussle had really cried out for.
