Rodri might have written himself into Manchester City folklore, but neutrals might remember this Champions League final primarily for Romelu Lukaku. Summoned from the bench in the second half, he was involved in two pivotal moments that ultimately decided the match.
A pile-on is not fair. At the end of the day, a player had a poor game: it happens all the time, and it’s just unfortunate that the stakes were magnified 100 times over on this occasion. Having rallied behind Loris Karius back in 2018, Liverpool in particular should understand that the Belgian will already be punishing himself more than enough.
But there can be no denying that Manchester City was hugely fortunate to find Lukaku in a less-than-clinical mood. Inadvertently blocking his teammate’s effort was more or less beyond his control, but the missed header from point-blank range was a colossal let-off as Pep Guardiola’s side rode its luck.
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Yet it was not just Lukaku who bailed Manchester City out. After all, he did not truly ‘miss’ that effort, in the sense that he at least got it on target. It was kept out by the leg of Ederson.
High on Istanbul fever, the BT Sport commentary team got altogether carried away, comparing it to Jerzy Dudek for Liverpool in 2005. But while this is clearly nonsense, it did share one similarity — the goalkeeper didn’t know all that much about it, but nonetheless deserves credit for being in the right position, at least somewhat shrinking the area where the striker could put it in order to score.
Ederson was at it again with the final action of the game, making a smart save to keep out Robin Gosens from a corner. Again, the cry of ‘what a save’ was very much a sign of being swept up in the moment, but it was a good stop. Manchester City had come under an unusual amount of pressure, and the goalkeeper stood firm to do what was required.
But talk about saving a performance for the big occasion. This was, by far, Ederson’s best display of the campaign. In fact, for the majority of the season — and indeed his Manchester City career — he has shown himself to be a distinctly average shot-stopper.
Guardiola’s success has certainly not been built on Ederson, much as he relied on him in Istanbul. For the most part, Manchester City has been turned into such a dominant force that the goalkeeper has been rendered almost irrelevant. The display against Inter Milan was undoubtedly a freakish occurrence, the first time all season that he has kept a clean sheet in a game where his side has allowed at least one post-shot expected goal (per Andrew Beasley on Twitter).
To put that another way, up until this point, every team to have had shots worth at least one goal against Ederson had been rewarded in kind. In fact, over the last year, the Manchester City stopper has actually underperformed his ‘expected goals against’ by 0.05 per 90 minutes (FBref).
All credit to him for excelling on the big Champions League stage. Lukaku’s miss may have been poor, but the post-shot model shows Ederson still deserves plenty of credit, with the placement of all Inter Milan’s efforts still enough on paper to warrant a goal against typical shot-stopping efforts.
But looking at the bigger picture, it is clear that the goalkeeping department is still one area where Liverpool has a significant advantage over Manchester City. In Alisson, manager Jürgen Klopp is able to call upon the best in the world.
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Over the same reference period, Alisson has been worth +0.24 goals per 90 compared to the post-shot expected goals tally he has faced. In simple terms, he is worth almost a full goal every four games to Liverpool compared to the average goalkeeper.
It’s only necessary to go back three games to find the last time he kept a clean sheet despite facing shots ‘worth’ more than one goal: the 3-0 win over Leicester. He did exactly the same against Fulham shortly before that, and in the 0-0 draw with Chelsea in April. Other examples include the 7-0 win over Manchester United and the 2-0 win over Newcastle, and that’s just since the turn of the year.
Knockout football is hugely dependent on seemingly random factors like this Ederson display. That’s one reason why it has taken Manchester City so long to win the biggest prize of them all, despite dominating in the domestic league — Guardiola has made a career out of taming chaos, something which cannot always be done in the Champions League. But over the course of 38 games, quality tends to prevail.
At least in the goalkeeping department, that makes it advantage Liverpool. There’s still plenty to fix in front of that in order to restore competitiveness with Manchester City, but Klopp knows that if he can manage it, then he boasts a major edge. The Ederson we just saw in Istanbul is not one capable of turning up every week, but Alisson has proved time and time again that he can do exactly that.