Nobody seemed to reach to the ball; the guy in the middle was jogging forward, Mangala was pressing the man and the other lad was doing your standard turn the defender and gamble. The lad in particularly that Mangala tracked is a lad who he had obviously been given instructions to press out of the defensive line as he did it literally the entire game, and it's something that we always do as part of our defensive strategy.
See here, the ball comes into the frame at the angle pretty much between the black dots. It almost dropped out of the sky and both the striker and Mangala are desperately attempting to slow down whereas Kolarov and the rest of the team seems to be stood watching. This doesn't suggest to me a ball which travels at a normal curve/angle, your mileage may differ of course but at the angle it came into shot and the reaction of the players, I don't see it.
I think to get that type of angle at the last part of an arc you'd presume it was kicked extremely high which would mean that everybody on the pitch would be pretty relaxed about where it's going to end up. To support this you'd need it to bounce high and straight. Here's the ball entering frame and the bounce
So now we think again. The ball is on a high arc looping almost straight up and then straight down, and remember both players in the first frame are already slowing down. They already have started their movement.
This means that suggesting that this guy had anything but a little bit of luck and instead is a genius which did Mangala up means that you think he started at least 10 yards back, seeing this ball that went straight up and straight down, ran all the way past it to the point where he carried Mangala a good yard past it then turned him? I'm not saying it can't happen, it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me that even a CL quality player is going to be THAT good of a predictor of future events that everything goes right for him.
Don't get me wrong, if this was a ball that was a normal long arc then I could see that that could happen as it does a hundred times a game. I just don't think anybody in the world has that much foreknowledge and skill to predict all those things and instead it's a player doing a pretty simplistic deep run then got lucky that everything fell into place for him.
It's a high ball on a Mancunian night in December. A bit of wind carrying it a yard or two and a striker gambling on his run just seems like the most simple option here rather than idea that all of this was incredibly precise planning.
You may disagree. But none of this changes that even after that ball bounced Mangala controlled the situation well and was let down by the midfield who refused to close down that triangle and a Yaya Toure who had no idea what to do in that scenario.