Forget the scoreboard for a second. Nobody at the Etihad was celebrating it. Erling Haaland limped off at full-time, Antoine Semenyo limped off too, and the only question City fans care about today is how long their best player is going to be out and who let him stay on the pitch long enough to make it worse.
Haaland scored twice, had another ruled out for offside after a VAR check, and stayed on for every minute of a match that refused to end. Referee Farai Hallam added 12 minutes of stoppage time, a real count of the delays that actually happened. Haaland played all of it, on top of the full 90, carrying whatever knock he'd picked up the entire way.
The anger here shouldn't land on the official. Those 12 minutes were earned honestly. A disallowed goal eats time, a VAR review eats more, and a penalty awarded in the 90th minute for a Guéhi foul, converted by Flemming, eats a chunk on its own. Hallam counted the delays and put them back on the clock. That's the job. Shouting about the length of stoppage time misses the real target.
The right target is the man who picked the team. Nobody forced City's hand here. Haaland wasn't pulled early to protect him; he finished every minute. The limp only showed up as he walked off, which means he'd been managing something through regulation and then through 12 extra minutes of a game City were already winning. Enzo Maresca decided he'd finish it.
He can't claim he didn't see it coming. He said it himself before kickoff. "At some point we probably need to give him rest, some days off," Maresca explained. "We are thinking about this not just with Erling because we have players, unfortunately or fortunately, they are playing all the games with us and all the games with the international teams." He laid out the exact problem in a press conference, then played his most important player into the ground in a match City had already won.
What the injury actually is remains an open question. Sam Lee of The Athletic traces it to a knock on the foot, which would be a contact injury and the best-case version. Jack Gaughan of the Daily Mail watched how Haaland walked and wondered about a knee. Nobody has a scan yet, and nobody actually knows. City are sweating over their best player now because nobody was willing to protect a two-goal lead by taking him off.
Fans will say three points are three points, and a nervy win spends the same as a routine one. That's true. It's also beside the point. If the foot is fine, Maresca got away with it. If it's weeks, City traded a chunk of their season for a few extra minutes of a Saturday against Ipswich, with PSG and Liverpool already looming on the other side of the break. That's a catastrophic exchange rate, and it was avoidable.
You don't get to publicly worry about burning out your striker and then burn out your striker. Maresca knew the risk, named it, and ran through it anyway.
