Both Everton and Liverpool have slipped on so many banana skins that even Bolton Wanderers' long ball-upstarts were talking of overtaking both of them a week ago.
Liverpool looked as though they were finally going to limp into the final qualification place for the Champions League on goal difference until City, the team once famous for inflatable bananas, produced a ripe skin 20 seconds from normal time through Dutchman Kiki Musampa, who is on loan from Atletico Madrid.
For Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez, it was a numbing defeat as he prepares for his most important match since arriving last summer, Wednesday's Champions League quarter-final second leg against Juventus in Turin. He knows that his team will need to find much more fire and invention if European qualification through the Premiership is not to become the only target left after that historic night, with its grisly ghosts of Heysel, but happy reminders of their old glory days.
Strictly speaking, with a 2-1 lead, they need only to produce one of those backs-to-the-wall performances of their European heyday to grind out a goalless draw and silence the crowd, as Bill Shankly loved to say. Both teams managed that effortlessly here for most of the game, even if City roused themselves to a stirring finish.
How Benitez would love to go to Italy with Fernando Morientes, who returned here, if only for his ability to play with his back to goal and control the play. Sadly for them, Morientes, the striker with by far the best Champions League pedigree at the club, is cup-tied for the visit to the Stadio Delle Alpi so Liverpool can only hope that he can contribute the Premiership goals to make sure they get back in.
Liverpool's cautious start to this game may have been due to their exertions in midweek or a fear that City would be running on pure adrenalin for manager Stuart Pearce's first home game in charge, though no one seems to know whether he is caretaker boss who will be judged on this season's remaining results or whether he already has the permanent keys to the manager's office, as well as the broom cupboard.
Pearce, who was given a standing ovation before kick-off, instructed his staff to scatter plenty of spare balls around the pitch perimeter so as to ensure that his team maintained a high tempo. Setting an example, he acted as a ballboy on a couple of occasions and for good measure, even managed to give an offside decision after completing one retrieval mission.
Despite going through his more menacing Psycho routines in the laughingly named technical area, his team looked incapable of developing so much as a high temperature. Only the subtle promptings of Frenchman Antoine Sibierski threatened to lift the threat of the crowd's hypothermia and it took the interception of Stephen Warnock to prevent him scoring on the stroke of half-time, which did not come a moment too soon.
After the energy they expended at Anfield on Tuesday, Liverpool's players looked a bit leggy, another favourite expression of footballing people. But when John Arne Riise, who has a left foot England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson would die for, swerved in a cross, Anthony Le Tallec only had to stoop to conquer with a header.
Instead, he shanked the ball so far over that it was beyond even Pearce to sprint round the goal to collect it.
Despite Liverpool's high ambitions for the rest of the season and City's desire to give their new manager a winning start to his first home game, both teams gave the sort of display that would normally have seen the match filed as a meaningless end-of-season affair.
Steven Gerrard tried to lift Liverpool's tempo at the start of the second half with one of those coltish, charging runs reminiscent of the late Crazy Horse, Emlyn Hughes, but his shot proved more of a hand-warmer for away fans behind the goal than for David James.
City fans tried to lift their side with a chorus of Blue Moon but they might as well have been baying at it until Musampa shot against a post and Joey Barton just failed to get a shot on target. Robbie Fowler, playing against the club where he was once a God, also came close to setting up a late goal, which would have allowed his 30th birthday celebrations to go with a swing.
Then, with the clock almost stopped, City substitute Lee Croft, back from a loan spell at Oldham, produced a cross from the right for Musampa's drilled winner.
Strangely, as the ball hit the back of the net, Pearce seemed in no hurry to get another ball on the pitch.