Good evening and welcome to live coverage of Manchester City vs Crystal Palace. I’ll bring you all the build-up ahead of kick-off, which is at 19:15 GMT.

Also interesting is the absolutely beautiful trim that Andros Townsend is displaying these days. It's been quite the turnaround for the Englishman in the barnet stakes.

Bit of an interesting tidbit from the matchday stat-pack: This is Andros Townsend's 15th appearance of the season for Palace, already more than he recorded in the entirety of the 2019-20 campaign.

Sterling makes a clever angled run behind the Palace defence, but Zinchenko’s ball over the top is a little too floated and Ward is able to scramble back and cut it out.

Bernardo Silva curls a teasing cross into the box but Tomkins beats Jesus to the header. The pressure is really building from City now.

Palace break and Eze tries to find a tricky return pass to Ayew. He can’t quite find it, but those two pose clear threat if Palace can find opportunities to counter at speed against a stretched City defence.

A City corner is floated deep and Palace deal with it well, but the hosts keep the pressure up and win themselves another set-piece. Again it’s deep, and again Stones is the target, but again Palace deal with it nicely.

There’s a very definite pattern to the match, with Palace barely having touched the ball in the first five minutes and City probing for gaps in the visiting defence.

City have started the game brightly, controlling possession as expected and pushing the in-form Gundogan high in midfield.

And away we go. Palace are in their usual blue and red stripes, City are in sky blue and white.

City have been making one or two headlines off the pitch of late, with the latest suggesting that another spending spree could be on the horizon.

That draw at Anfield means that City will go ahead of Liverpool (and Spurs and Leicester) with a victory this evening. Pep Guardiola’s start this match five points off Manchester United at the top of the table, but they have two games in hand over all of the teams above them. It definitely feels like City are on the march, and a win tonight would make that very clear in the table.

Admittedly this isn’t the headline game of the day in the Premier League. That honour fell to a match that has just recently concluded...

Roy Hodgson is without Wilfried Zaha today, so Jordan Ayew comes in to offer a slightly different style of attacking threat. Gary Cahill and James McCarthy return after missing the draw with Arsenal last time out.

Man City make four changes to the side that dispatched Brighton, with returns to the starting line-up for Raheem Sterling, Fernandinho, Gabriel Jesus and Kyle Walker.