Manchester City have picked up where they left off last season, but if any team can expose their flaws, it’s Liverpool.
Manchester City won the league so easily last season the watching world seemed to grow indifferent before it even had time to finish being impressed. Such is the price of total dominance. So far in 2018-19, little has changed.
The problem, if you can call it that, isn’t that City are boring so much as it is that they’re thrilling in exactly the same way every week. There’s no suspect defense to keep things interesting; the debate about whether Pep Guardiola’s style can work in England has long since been settled; even the novelty of watching Ederson play first-time, 60-yard diagonals half the league’s central midfielders would be proud of seems to have worn off.
And so maybe it’s time for a reminder: City have been downright regal in the league this term, winning six of their seven matches and drawing the other one only because Willy Boly was allowed to score with his hand. They’ve averaged almost a goal a game more than second-place Liverpool (and are on pace to shatter their record goal difference from last season (and the underlying numbers suggest this is no fluke)). And they’ve done it all without their best player, Kevin De Bruyne, who returned to training this week.
Of course Pep Guardiola tinkers and tinkers away — shifting formations so frequently in the middle of three-, four-, five-goal wins against the mid-table’s latest sacrificial lamb his behavior has come to seem less like management than a kind of elaborate, tactical onanism — but when a team have 85 percent of the ball every match, it’s hard to sell the fact their right-back wanders into central midfield occasionally as any profound managerial innovation.
Instead of finding something new to say about City, then, we focus on the rest of the league’s so-called elite. Manchester United lurch from one Jose Mourinho-induced existential crisis to the next. Tottenham are so busy trying to hold their window of contention open they seem to have forgotten to actually contend. Arsenal and Chelsea are busy adapting, with varying degrees of success, to new managers, both wildly different to their old ones. These are things we know how to talk about: volatility, crisis, transition. Perfection is far less interesting. Call it soccer’s Anna Karenina principle: All dominant teams are alike; each flawed team is flawed in its own way.
Which brings us, at last, to Liverpool, the only team in England, possibly in Europe, in whose presence City look genuinely, thrillingly flawed. Chelsea may yet force their way into the conversation, but for now the Reds remain City’s challengers-elect. If they can’t do it, seems to be the feeling, no one will.
Ahead of Manchester City’s trip to Anfield on Sunday, then, with both sides level on 19 points, it doesn’t feel particularly melodramatic to suggest there’s more at stake than a chance for one side to move three points ahead of the other. Such is City’s quality, a big away win — any away win, really — would feel, even at this early stage, like the end. A home win wouldn’t be nearly as decisive, but it would at least give us some hope that we haven’t conjured Liverpool’s title credentials out of the thin air, that the Premier League’s beloved anything-can-happen-here narrative might live to fight another day.
There are certainly reasons to be optimistic. The two sides played each other four times last season. Liverpool won three, and played for over 45 minutes with 10 men in the one they lost (although they were losing 1-0 before Sadio Mane was sent off), meaning Jurgen Klopp has now beaten Guardiola eight times in 14 tries, twice as often as any other manager.
More to the point, Liverpool are better than they were last season. Virgil van Dijk (with an assist from Andy Robertson) improved the defense immediately upon his arrival in January, and it has gotten even better since then. Trent Alexander-Arnold’s continued development, the signing of Allison and, perhaps above all, the emergence of Joe Gomez as one of the finest young center-backs in the league have helped make the Reds’ defense not just not bad, but actually, legitimately good.
Indeed, through the first seven matches of the season, the back five have looked far more accomplished than the front three, who aren’t playing badly, but whose interplay and decision making in the final third has only fleetingly reached the heights of 2017-18.
That, of course, is a reason to be pessimistic. Liverpool were ruthless on the counter-attack in their victories against City last term, as they will need to be again if they’re to win on Sunday. Salah, in particular, caused problems by exploiting the space behind City’s rotating cast of left-backs (it’s likely to be either Fabian Delph or Aymeric Laporte, neither of whom is a natural in the position, on Sunday). Strange as it is to say, City might be a welcome sight for an out-of-form Salah.
The other primary concern is in midfield, where Klopp will be without Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who scored the opening goal in Liverpool’s 4-3 win in the league and their second in the 3-0 win in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinal. The obvious replacement is Naby Keita, Liverpool’s only central midfielder capable of pressing City as necessary and also contributing meaningfully in the final third, though it’s unclear whether Klopp would select the Guinean in his current best XI.
Oxlade-Chamberlain vs Man City - (Both legs CL)https://t.co/QEXDl0MJY9
— Harry (@HS_10Ftbol) July 18, 2018
James Milner, Georginio Wijnaldum and Jordan Henderson started against Chelsea last weekend and against PSG in the Champions League opener, their two hardest matches of the season so far. Keita got the nod against Napoli midweek after an impressive substitute appearance at Stamford Bridge, but was forced off with an injury in the first half. It’s too soon to know if he’ll recover in time for City.
Henderson hasn’t been bad, but he has been worse than Milner and Wijnaldum, and if anyone makes way for Keita, it will almost certainly be him. Whether Klopp is prepared to drop his captain for the most important game of Liverpool’s season remains to be seen, but there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest Keita-Wijnaldum-Milner is the Reds’ best midfield trio.
Whoever starts, we know what we’ll get from Liverpool: They’ll mostly let City do what they want until somewhere around the center circle, look to spring their front three on the counter and, when the moment’s right, press City deep in their own half.
Whether it works or not will depend largely on whatever shenanigans Guardiola gets up to, which are much harder to predict. The City manager has a reputation for overthinking things in the big matches. That may or may not be fair, but his team selection against Liverpool last season seems to support the idea.
He played a back three/five in the 5-0 win at the Etihad (which was working pretty well even before Mane was sent off) and reverted to a more familiar 4-3-3 in the 4-3 loss at Anfield (with Fernandinho, Ilkay Gundogan and De Bruyne in midfield). That loss seemed to trouble the City manager, though. For the Champions League quarterfinal first leg, he dropped Sterling, played Laporte as a sort left center-back-cum-left-back and used four central midfielders, Fernandinho, Gundogan, De Bruyne and Silva. They lost 3-0.
He changed formation again for the second leg, opting for a back three that was often more of a back two and occasionally even a back one. Given they had a three-goal deficit to claw back, it would be unreasonable to read too much into that one. Still, four matches, four starting XIs, four separate systems. Even for a Guardiola team, that’s a lot.
To an extent, the specific formation Guardiola settles on is irrelevant — whatever it is, it’s going to spend a lot of time looking like something else; the point of all the tinkering is to find the right balance between defense and attack. Guardiola clearly fears Liverpool’s counter-attack, understandably so, and seemed unsure last season whether to fully embrace his possession-first instincts, or to play a more counter-attacking game himself. (It’s notable that Chelsea, another possession-dominant team, had success against Liverpool last week by ceding far more possession than normal.)
Whichever system he settles on, over these next few days, for the first time all season, it will be possible to portray City as vulnerable. Flawed, even. Hopefully it will not also be the last time.