Hotspur hoodoo ends as City go through

MAYBE Manchester City fans should be worried about Pep Guardiola walking away from English football.

-  SIMON BAJKOWSKI

A day that began with news that one of the biggest thorns in Manchester City is leaving ended with coming face-to-face with another: the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. In five matches across four different managers in the home dugout, Pep Guardiola's side have such an awful record that the joke was this was his only target left.

Watching the man be so animated that he often strayed out of his technical area and still found time to put his point across to officials at full-time despite having already been booked, there looks to be plenty of energy left in the manager.

With a late Nathan Ake goal-breaking their stadium curse and sending them through to the fifth round, his team are certainly not going anywhere either.

City (and Spurs) arrived into the game refreshed, having last played two weeks ago before enjoying the Premier League winter break.

The Blues went off to a training camp in Abu Dhabi in temperatures far warmer than the chill that greeted them in North London.

Within five minutes, they were back in their paradise. Oscar Bobb, starting after scoring the winner at Newcastle a fortnight ago, stabbed in the rebound after Guglielmo Vicario couldn't fully keep out Phil Foden's effort.

Not for the first time in this fixture, along came VAR.

The goal was flagged as offside and after a lengthy replay that wasn't shown on the big screen for the capacity crowd inside the stadium, Bobb was shown to be just off.

That was about as close as the visitors would come in the first half to Vicario's goal, yet defensively they were faultless.