Liverpool’s Luis Díaz finds full scamp mode to torment Manchester City

Three minutes into the second half of this FA Cup semi-final Luis Díaz took the ball just inside his own half, looked up and saw in freeze-frame the figure of Fernandinho suspended inches above the Wembley turf, rotated at an angle of 60 degrees to the ground, left leg extended to meet the ball – and in the process to send Díaz in a semi-somersault arc as the frame of Fernandino propelled itself through the space where previously he, Díaz, had stood.

It wasn’t a foul, although the next one on Sadio Mané was, a slide into the ankle that really could have led to Fernandino being sent off. The tackle on Díaz was more like a message, a considered personal missive from the entire Manchester City dressing room. Because City will have hated the first half of this game.

They finished it 3-0 down, having played like a team with small sacks of gravel tied to their ankles: hungover, frazzled, heads pounding, still burping up the taste of three-day-old after-dinner Atlético liqueurs.

Mainly, they will have hated what Díaz did to them, the frills of his game as much as the hard edges. Díaz was not the man of the match in this 3-2 victory (that was probably Mané or Thiago). He didn’t score a goal or directly create one. But for 45 minutes he did something to City nobody has for quite some time, perhaps not since the 3-0 loss in the Champions League in 2018 when Mohamed Salah was in full galloping hare mode.

Díaz took the mickey. He pranced about. He made risky little mocking turns and flicks. He looked, above all, like a man enjoying himself, which is in itself an affront to City’s sense of self. Here is a team that prides itself on suffocating its opponents, in inducing a migrainous 90-minute tightening of the temples. Fun? You don’t