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He had not dominated the midfield; there were not the rampaging runs of old; at times he even looked a little bit lost, as he has all season. Yet as the game closed in and City grew ever more desperate, slowly, surely the influence of Yaya Toure begun to be felt. The Ivorian, has seemed a distant figure of late. Whether his form had been affected by an astonishingly trivial matter � the lack of a birthday cake � or, more likely, a tragic one, in the death of his brother, it felt as though the Premier League had lost one its leading men.