Manchester City Holds Off Aston Villa to Win Third Straight League Cup

For something he doesn’t much care about, Pep Guardiola has a curious knack for winning the League Cup. The Manchester City manager has been open about his belief that the secondary domestic cup competition needlessly clutters the calendar, but after Man City's 2–1 victory over Aston Villa on Sunday, he has now won it three times in a row, while City has won five of the last seven overall. If you include the Community Shield, as Guardiola does, City has won eight of the last nine domestic trophies in England.

It was not a procession of a final, which perhaps underlined what has gone awry for City this season. As City swept into a two-goal lead within half an hour, this looked like being another anti-climactic affair, but a barely explicable error from John Stones allowed Villa back into the game. City, suddenly, while still dominating, looked a little flustered. Chances were missed, and passes went astray. This is how it has been for the past few months, a team that habitually runs games through midfield finding it unable to take advantage, squandering chances and undermining itself with defensive errors.

On a weekend when the Premier League's 19th-placed team had beaten its undefeated leader, and its 20th-placed had beaten third, the possibility that the 18th might beat second in the Carabao Cup final seemed perhaps less outlandish than usual. And had Anwar El-Ghazi not headed a very presentable chance over after three minutes, perhaps it would have been a different story.

Perhaps. But the truth is that City was better than Villa on the day, and it is far, far better than Villa overall. Vast resources intelligently deployed have made City a formidable side with which the majority of the Premier League simply cannot compete. That Villa found a way to make it a battle was testament to its resolve, but this was a dogged, exhausting rearguard action.

The opening goal came after 20 minutes and was a classic City strike. Raheem Sterling’s advance on the left drew defenders towards him. He played the ball infield to Rodri, whose chip found Phil Foden, and he headed on for Sergio Aguero to volley in via the underside of Tyron Mings’s calf.

Ten minutes later it was 2-0. Villa will protest that the corner from which the goal stemmed should have been a goal kick, but still, the marking was poor as Rodri stole in to head home. At that point, it seemed a matter of how many City would score, whether it would be a repeat of last season’s FA Cup final, when City put a record-tying six past Watford.

But then, from nowhere, Villa pulled one back four minutes before the break. Stones has been a rare presence in the City side this season, his career seemingly at a crossroads as, at 25, his capacity for errors can no longer be written off as the result of his youth and inexperience. Given his chance from the start, Stones again made a notable gaffe, the sort of issue that has been undermining City all season. Under little pressure, Stones lost his balance under a dropping ball and fell over presenting possession to El-Ghazi, whose cross was powered home by the head of Tanzania international Mbwana Samatta.

The second half was a far more open game, one that had real edge. There was a scattering of wild fouls and yellow cards, and Guardiola became so concerned that he was forced to introduce both Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva. That he had such strength available on the bench, of course, is indicative both of City’s depth and the allowances Guardiola made for a match that fell between last Wednesday’s victory away to Real Madrid and next Wednesday’s FA Cup trip to Sheffield Wednesday.

And Villa had its chance to level amid a flurry of late set plays, with Bjorn Engels’s header from an 87th-minute corner being turned against the post by Claudio Bravo. In the end, those two first-half goals proved enough, but this was a far better final than had seemed likely after half an hour. It will frustrate Villa that the decisive goal ended up resulting from such poor defending, and it will trouble City that, yet again, it ended up struggling to finish off an opponent to which it was so clearly superior.

And for everybody else, there was just the relief that this had actually been a game, that City’s win was hard-fought and that a major final at Wembley was a proper spectacle.