Sergio Gomez and VAR madness might have disrupted Man City's fixture plan

It's safe to say Manchester City's Champions League trip to Denmark didn't go to plan.

Pep Guardiola had seen his City side breeze past Copenhagen at the Etihad six days before, and felt that his squad had enough to record another three points at the Parken Stadium with a few changes including the resting of Erling Haaland. With a trip to Liverpool following on Sunday — an away game City have won just once since 2003 — appeared to take priority over Copenhagen.

As well as Haaland, Guardiola rested Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden and Ruben Dias. He will surely have hoped to give starters Joao Cancelo, Kevin De Bruyne, Rodri and Ilkay Gundogan a rest later in the game if they were as comfortable as they had been last week.

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So when Rodri fired City ahead with a brilliant effort, Guardiola will have been delighted. Except that sparked the beginning of City's downfall, with referee Artur Dias wrongly ruling the effort out after it brushed Riyad Mahrez's arm in the build-up. Aside from the fact that UEFA's rules explicitly state accidental handballs in the build-up to a teammate scoring shouldn't be punished, referee Dias needed plenty of persuasion when he reviewed the incident on his monitor. It wasn't a clear and obvious error, yet he still ruled it out.

And that probably played on his mind when the ball hit a Copenhagen arm in the box as Manuel Akanji jostled for a cross. Again, there was no intention, and the arm was locked with Akanji's as the ball came in. Yet the precedent had been set, and City had the penalty. Unfortunately for them, Mahrez missed it, and the scores remained level.

On one hand, two wrong decisions were cancelled out. Yet