Nigel Pearson might have joined a strange list after his side’s late but great victory against Blackburn Rovers on Saturday: Harry Houdini, David Blaine, Dean Gunnarson and Anthony Gallup.
How does Pearson fit into this set of niche names? They’re escape artists and the City manager has created a happy knack, or not so happy when you consider why he’s escaping, of getting out of tight holes himself.
He’s made sure that when the Robins seem body bound in rope of handcuffed in a box underwater they have found a way to gnaw free of their binding restrictions and rise to the surface for another breath. This isn’t meant as a metaphor for staving off relegation, that has luckily never seemed too likely this season despite the large troughs for every late Ewood Park peak that there has also been.
This is a representation that despite the unwanted home and away runs this season, in spite of the woeful defensive displays which mean City have conceded as many goals as last season in 10 fewer games and even with uncertainty looming around every corner, the brilliance of their escape acts are memorable enough to serve this season with entertainment.
If nothing else, and there’s reason to argue that there is plenty to go alongside this, Pearson has incredible dramatic timing and can always drag his team to a decisive result just before the conversations become terminal or the atmosphere too toxic. He would say that leaving it this late is an issue, and it is, but not allowing the situation to develop into further disarray provides its own intangible report of achievement.
That’s why it always seems that when all the tarot cards are on the table and they say that the end is clouded and nigh, a squad that has been reprimanded for its failure in character and backbone stand up with better posture than before and roar back.
This time the saviour for Pearson and the Robins fans was Andi Weimann, and these are some of the finer details you might have missed in Lancashire.
Bentley’s brilliant day
At half-time it was looking pretty torturous to write this. There was a general nodding and consensus from the press box when someone muttered “not a classic” and our response was a confident belief that we’d seen much better.
Outside of Antoine Semenyo’s early drive wide of goal and Dan Bentley’s sharp movement to stop Darragh Lenihan’s free header, most of the action passed by in a yawnful haze of Blackburn wind.
The home side did eventually assert the dominance that the table, even if not their most recent form, suggested they should have over their Bristolian visitors. It was Reda Khadra that sparked the game into the constant life that blazed away in a craze for the rest of the match.
His bending effort that crashed into Bentley’s crossbar was kept out by a force greater than just gravity, it felt that there was a gravitational mass surrounding the goal that kept the Ben Brereton Diaz-less hosts away.
From the warm-up it seemed like the City skipper was going to be on his best form, battering away awkward and bouncing volleys from Pat Mountain and Harvey Wiles-Richards. Whilst watching Bentley face shots from the edge of the box he didn’t concede a single goal and seemed to cover the goal with his body and confidence. Punching and swatting away shots he couldn’t hold onto.
His warm-up form transpired into the match and the save to deny Lenihan in the first half was crucial at a time where his team needed a final line of defence to keep their fragile state at set pieces from ascending any lower.
He also commanded his angles with mastery to deny Khadra from a tight shot. That was nothing compared to his match-winning second half display. The stats alone don’t do it justice but do sum up his resilience and dominance over the Blackburn attack.
Albeit Rovers haven’t been the same efficient counterattacking machine without their Chilean striker, Bentley made seven saves in the game which is almost double his average saves per game this season and stopped Blackburn from achieving even one of the 1.63 accumulated xG throughout the 90 minutes.
At the forefront of his game was the decisive penalty stop from Bradley Dack’s weak spot-kick. Be the tame effort partly down to his experience in delaying the penalty – more on that in a minute – or because on today of all days, Bentley just wasn’t going to be beaten, it was a vital contribution to the heroic cause.
The applause he got at full time from the City fans in the heavens – a bit more on them to come, too – he fully deserved it. The warrior cry, bulging neck veins and pumping arms were all a sign of how much the day meant to him. Had it not been for his impenetrable forcefield, City might not have taken anything from the game.
It’s also easy to forget that just a few weeks ago Bentley wasn’t playing games and so he deserves credit for showing the mental toughness to come back into the team and perform with man of the match standards on multiple occasions.
He was a key reason behind beating Middlesborough at Ashton Gate and stopped Birmingham from running away with victory last weekend too. With that in mind, after the first week of Robert Pattinson’s masked vigilante running around Gotham, this might have been a new instalment to the series. The Bentley-man, fighting crime with his sideshow Robins.
Penalty madness
Right, time to delve into a bit more detail about the moment that swung the match. In a frantic craze of several minutes there were bodies piling into the penalty box and plenty went under the radar in the mix.
First of all, it’s worth noting that nobody is quite sure what the penalty was given for in the first place, although some people have speculated it for a shirt pull from Han-Noah Massengo.
That aside, the refereeing performance from Gavin Ward was being headlined for the wrong reason’s as the Championship’s standard of officiating entered the glaring spotlight again.
Not only was the man in black angering Blackburn manager Tony Mowbray on the touchline, Pearson himself spoke first slyly about Ward rather than winning the match. The referee lost control in a frenzied atmosphere for the final 20 minutes where every decision was disputed and even Bentley and Weimann wasting time to cool the cauldron only incited more anger.
Anyway, after the penalty was given there was at least two minutes before Dack’s kick was saved as City players protested and filled the box, Blackburn tried to get the game going and Ward had taken somewhat charge of the situation, though it looked ominously like two playground teams officiating themselves at this point with no regard for the class teacher’s whistle.
As the penalty was finally taken it wasn’t clear who the City keeper was. By the time Dack had stuttered and walked to kick the ball Klose was almost running past him to guard any rebound attempt. If this was in the Premier League you’d think it would have been taken again for infringement, because this was the biggest of false starts from the Swiss.
He’s extremely fortunate it wasn’t noticed by either official, but that’s also not surprising given their struggle to control the game at this point.
Outside of Klose being too eager was a pride of equally excited home supporters that crowded behind the goal together to record the moment their team won the game. Or not. A group of around 100 fans clambered down the steps, pulled out their phone cameras and were set on jumping around in advance of the kick being taken.
They didn’t see the save coming and had to awkwardly make their slow trudge back up to their seats moments later in a mass exodus. You could only laugh as City went up the other end a few minutes later and stole the show.
City fans in the heavens
When the fixtures are going against you, they really do go against you. As far as away days go, Blackburn and Barnsley in the space of four days isn’t one that screams out as luxurious. It might even make the international break just around the corner look appealing.
This is the second time already in 2022 that City fans can feel hard done by with the scheduling, an away trio of Preston, Luton and Blackpool in the space of 10 days was no more easy to stomach.
Given the circumstances – and perhaps Blackburn’s solid home record – only 478 City fans were recorded as being at Ewood Park, though the number looked smaller than that. Stuck away in the top tier of the stand behind the scene of Weimann’s winning goal was a small group of the most loyal supporters.
Splattered red spots dripped off the blue seats up high in the Lancashire heavens. It can’t have been a bad angle to watch the game but you can only imagine that the view for the final moments in front of them would have been better had they been allowed some allocation in the lower stand which was completely empty.
Why the decision was made to send them into the land of the God’s is unknown and looked unusual as the game was anything but a sell-out.
Dancing the Williams Waltz
Did he mean it? Didn’t he mean it? Does it matter? Who actually cares? Joe Williams, take a bow. His scuffed, un-timed and game-ending shocker turned into a moment of extreme vision that Ronaldinho wouldn’t have foreseen.
It was like one of the football app games that you play on your phone, drawing curved lines on the screen and magically seeing the ball dance around the pitch as if there’s no such thing as gravity, defying the laws of all physics.
Skewing the ball over the Blackburn defence with the outside of his right foot, lobbing a perfectly arced swerve ball onto the waiting foot of Weimann. Williams’ attempted something has gone down as his second assist of the season, assist is being generous.
The more you watch him pile his head over the ball and set up for the drive the more it looks like it couldn’t have been a shot because nobody could get it that wrong, the trajectory would have almost taken it behind where he struck the ball.
Nobody was worried about that though, at full-time his team congratulated him, or bullied him for the effort. Antoine Semenyo jumped on top of the Liverpudlian in his long, knee length coat and rubbed his head joyfully. Ayman Benarous joined in, taking him by the hands and swinging Williams around like a dancer pirouetting and launching into a triple axle.
Weimann came to find Williams after the game as the celebrations moved over into the corner where the City fans were up high. The Austrian caught the eye of his teammate and pointed with both hands out in front of him, you!
The age-old question still remains with Williams, if he can stay fit then he’s one of the best in his position. Goals and assists are something that the Robins need from midfield more this season though. When the away victory has died down somebody might have to seriously take Williams aside and teach him how to strike a ball from distance, but that might not be for a while.
When watching the goal back, like we’re sure everyone has at least 50 times by now, you can almost see the visible frustration from Williams as he rocks back after the shot. Soon after he has a millisecond to admire his well-crafted handywork and sprint off in celebration, bemused that he had found an unplayable pass by accident.
As the celebrations died down Williams found the TV cameras and laid claim to the deliberate assist as he shouted “what a pass!” into the lens. You’re not fooling us, Joe.
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