Man City 3-1 Chelsea: Phil Foden and Erling Haaland fire Pep Guardiola’s side into the top four after Robert Sanchez’s error strewn display

Sometimes, football is a game of calamities. Sometimes, it is defined by the kind of errors that provide the shade to the light that is the beauty of the game. Sometimes, the game is as much about nightmares as it is about dreams.

This was a game about two players who will be haunted by a memory. It is about one player who got away with it because his team won and another player who did not. Because his error condemned his side to defeat.

The game was less than three minutes old, and therefore Abdokodir Khusanov was less than three minutes into his debut for Manchester City, when he first started to wish that the pitch at the Etihad Stadium would open up and swallow him.

Khusanov is only 20. He’s just a kid really. He’s the first player from Uzbekistan to play in the Premier League and he arrived in England last week from Lens for £33m, not knowing a word of English.

And then, after not much more than two minutes of his first game, against Chelsea, he stooped to try to head an awkward bouncing ball back to Ederson and only succeeded in heading it straight into the path of Nicolas Jackson.

Jackson squared it to Noni Madueke, who scored. Two minutes later, Khusanov was booked and anyone who had put money on him to get sent off at odds of 88-1 was starting to fancy their chances. ‘What I thought,’ Pep Guardiola said afterwards, summoning a faint smile, ‘was that it was not the best start. Right?’

Khusanov, part of a desperate £127m City January transfer splurge, was so nervous, so mortified, so uncertain that he could barely pass the ball. His teammates avoided passing to him as much as they could. He lasted until the 52nd minute, when Pep Guardiola substituted him.

But this was a game that did not turn on Khusanov’s mistake. It turned on another mistake. Another mistake committed by a player who looked horrified by what he had done, another mistake that was a reminder that this game is unforgiving and brutal and that its players, at this level, are held to the highest standards.

So forget Khusanov, for a minute. This game turned on a calamitous error by Chelsea goalkeeper Robert Sanchez, a player who is told almost every week by pundits or armchair critics on social media that he is not good enough for Chelsea.

Sanchez has been identified as a weak link in Chelsea’s billion pound trolley dash around world football. He has been told that Chelsea will never win anything with him in the side. He must yearn to prove those doubters wrong but this was not the day for that.

It was midway through the second half and the scores were locked at 1-1 when Sanchez rushed out of his goal in the mistaken assumption that he would get to a loose ball before Erling Haaland, City’s £250m man.

He realised his error too late. Haaland got to the ball first and even though Sanchez turned tail and tried to regain his ground, Haaland is simply too good and too deadly to let a mistake like that go unpunished. Haaland spun and chipped the ball expertly over Sanchez and into the net.

Sanchez fell to the ground briefly in horror. He beat his fist into the turf in a fury of self-loathing and then stood to take in the reality of what he had done and what he had cost his team. Chelsea never looked like recovering. Phil Foden extended City’s lead in the dying minutes.

Khusanov will live to fight another day. He looked particularly lugubrious as he walked on to the pitch to congratulate his teammates but this was his debut and he will get other chances. Sanchez may not. Days like this will seal his fate.

No player has made more errors leading to a goal in the Premier League this season than Sanchez, who has made five. ‘We trust Robert for sure,’ Chelsea coach Enzo Maresca said after the game, ‘but in the same moment he is aware that he is making mistakes.’

The Chelsea transfer gurus, who have already spent so much money, will be preparing to spend some more to replace him. If not now, then in the summer.

And so, in the end, after their horror show start, City eased past Chelsea. They looked comfortably the better side. And if Chelsea have a problem with their goalkeeper, they have others, too. They spent £1bn and forgot to buy a decent centre forward, too. And Enzo Fernandez still looks very, very ordinary for £108m.

They have only won one of their last seven league games and they are falling fast. City will be particularly relieved to have beaten them here, particularly after their capitulation against PSG in the Parc des Princes on Wednesday.

As the departure of one of their great players, Kyle Walker, to AC Milan was confirmed, they needed a morale boost ahead of their showdown against Club Bruges this Wednesday, which will decide whether they squeeze into the Champions League play-offs and this gave it to them.

Their 3-1 victory lifted them above Bournemouth, Chelsea and Newcastle United into the top four and even if there is little hope of them catching Liverpool at the top, their win restored a little pride after so many recent reverses.

Guardiola had decided to throw Khusanov and fellow new signing, Omar Marmoush, straight into the starting line-up after City’s abject defeat in Paris but poor Khusanov had looked paralysed by nerves, even when he was walking down the line of Chelsea players, shaking their hands before kick-off. When the game actually began, things got a lot worse.

It wasn’t just Khusanov. City’s defending as a whole was shambolic at the start. A simple pass forward from Moises Caicedo played Palmer through on goal. Palmer should have scored but he squared the ball to Jackson and Jackson wasted the chance.

But City steadied themselves and three minutes before half time, Josko Gvardiol, who had been their best attacking player, got the goal he deserved. Ilkay Gundogan was the prompt once more and when Sanchez saved bravely from Matheus Nunes, the ball bounced out to Gvardiol, who swept it home exuberantly.

Chelsea gave Gundogan and Ederson plenty of time to hit searching long balls forward to Haaland and, increasingly, City began to like their odds of making the tactic pay.

Haaland was simply too strong and too good for the Chelsea defence.

So when Ederson launched a long ball out of defence midway through the second half and Haaland outmuscled Chalobah, Sanchez rushed from his goal and condemned himself to his fate.

City finished things off three minutes from the end when some brilliant hold-up play by Haaland opened up space for Foden to dash into. He held off a chasing pack and slotted his shot past Sanchez, for whom redemption must have felt like a distant prospect.