Chris Wood’s late Nottingham Forest leveller stuns wasteful Manchester City

With six minutes of normal time to play and with Phil Foden and Erling Haaland’s second-half misses doubtlessly replaying in his mind, Pep Guardiola’s worst fears were confirmed. Before kick-off Manchester City had thought this might be the day they capitalised on an Arsenal slip but in the end they tripped up as Chris Wood cancelled out Bernardo Silva’s brilliant opener to deny City victory and earn Nottingham Forest another valuable point in their fight for survival. Steve Cooper skipped down the touchline in delight at Wood’s equaliser but Guardiola will be left to stew on how a game that they should have put to bed wriggled clean of their grasp.

Guardiola spent almost the entirety of the first half with his hands on his hips on the edge of his technical area. Along the touchline Cooper arched his back as Forest, who often set up to flummox their opponents with 11 men behind the ball, extinguished myriad City attacks, some with more ease than others. Serge Aurier earned a warm ovation from the Forest support after his early slide tackle on Haaland siphoned the ball from the City forward. Joe Worrall, one of five Forest changes, resorted to making a crude challenge on Jack Grealish on the edge of the box. Grealish, not for the first time, was a marked man and by the end his shirt was caked in mud stains.

For Guardiola, the numbers at half-time offered a stark indicator of how this trip threatened to be a banana skin. City had completed 397 passes to Forest’s 72 and racked up almost five times as many touches. But until Silva struck four minutes before the interval Guardiola was visibly fretting at the developing theme. Haaland failed to make the ball stick inside the six-yard box after Kevin De Bruyne rolled a pass