A great game for English football," Charlie Adam said afterwards. Not, however, a great game of English football, at least in the sense of one typifying national characteristics. Both sides included highly mobile miniature ball‑manipulators in their starting lineups – Luis Suárez and Dirk Kuyt for the home team, Sergio Agüero, Samir Nasri and David Silva for the visitors – with the result that there was no shortage of fluid movement. But this was a game that cried out for the introduction of the big men, and eventually it got three of them, with highly contrasting results.
One of those big men was Mario Balotelli, whose expulsion in the 83rd minute, 18 minutes after his arrival as a substitute for Nasri, prefaced an episode after the final whistle that reportedly culminated in damage to the door of the away team's dressing room.
"If he damaged the door, he pays," Roberto Mancini said. "Just like his house."
At least Balotelli did not try to burn down Anfield, although the sulphurous looks the 21-year-old forward was giving as he arrived on the pitch suggested that his instinct for starting conflagrations was even closer to the surface than usual.
His first contribution to the match, six minutes after his arrival, was as comical as his latest haircut, a blond stripe with shaved patterns running fore and aft. When Agüero swept the ball across the pitch to meet Balotelli's run down the left, his marker, Martin Skrtel, responded by falling over, leaving the Italian a clear passage to goal. In the split-second before the ball arrived, however, Balotelli himself also tripped over and landed in a tangle of his own limbs: a moment of pure slapstick but, in terms of the match, hugely wasteful.
For the next five minutes he did nothing except shoot baleful glances at all and sundry, until the fateful moment when he tracked Glen Johnson's advance down the left flank of City's defence and tugged the full-back round by the upper arm as he was running on to Lucas Leiva's pass. A yellow card was followed by an inswinging Adam free-kick and chaos in the City area before Joe Hart secured the ball.
Back into his sulk went Balotelli, until the moment when Skrtel rose to challenge for a looping ball just outside the Liverpool penalty area and the Italian ran across to obstruct him with his arm thrust across the defender's face. Down went Skrtel, up went Martin Atkinson's hand – first with a second yellow, then with a red – and off went Balotelli.
His current statistics are remarkable: nine goals in his last 11 games, coinciding with City's rise to the top of the table, but also six yellow cards in his last six appearances, two of them accounting for a dismissal that will cost him an appearance in the team's next domestic fixture, a Carling Cup match at Arsenal on Tuesday, for which he might anyway have been rested.
There were two dismissals last season, one at The Hawthorns, where he collected a pair of cautions during a game in which he scored both goals in City's 2-0 win, and one at home against Dynamo Kiev, a Europa League game which City won 1-0 despite being down to 10 men for almost an hour, but still lost the tie on aggregate. In his limited appearances during two seasons under José Mourinho at Internazionale he was also sent off twice, both times in Champions League ties, against Werder Bremen three years ago and Rubin Kazan a year later.
Mancini, who did not think the second yellow card on Sunday was justified, refused to criticise his player, repeating his mantra that Balotelli is still young. Kenny Dalglish was almost sympathetic. "Sometimes you look in the mirror and get the answer," he said, probably not referring to the haircut. "Sometimes he doesn't help himself. Maybe he gets punished for things other people wouldn't get punished for. But if you help yourself, you don't get into those situations."
City's second big man, replacing Agüero just before Balotelli's departure, was Edin Dzeko, whose impact was negligible. Then Dalglish belatedly introduced his own strapping centre‑forward, and Andy Carroll came closer than anyone to snatching all three points when he met Johnson's clever diagonal chip from the right with a powerful header that forced Hart into a save that all by itself should have been enough to secure the man‑of‑the‑match award.
The big men may not have decided the outcome but they added to the afternoon's entertainment. And if Fabio Capello was watching on television, he will know not only that Carroll is very definitely still worth consideration but that, in Micah Richards, Johnson has another credible rival besides Kyle Walker for England's right-back slot.
