Liverpool and Manchester City Leave Everyone Hungry for More
Every meeting between any of the Premier League’s elite teams is, these days, billed as a crucial showdown, a Super Sunday. Even by those standards, though, Manchester City’s visit to Anfield had taken on an outsize significance.
Martin Atkinson brought his whistle to his lips and, with that slight theatrical flourish beloved of all referees, pointed his right arm at the penalty spot. For a moment — not even that — there was silence. And then, in just a couple of heartbeats, Anfield, as one, went through the five stages of grief.
First, denial: a willful refusal to believe that, in the dying minutes of the most important game of the season thus far, Liverpool’s Virgil Van Dijk had mistimed his challenge on Manchester City’s Leroy Sané. Next, anger: at Atkinson for having the temerity to award the shot. On the field, the players tried to bargain with him; off it, the fans groaned in despair. A few dozen, a few hundred, started to head toward the exits, accepting their fate: Manchester City would score, and win, and Liverpool would lose.
On the substitutes’ bench, Sergio Agüero, City’s regular penalty-taker, sat and watched. He had been substituted — after yet another fruitless excursion here, to this stadium where he has never scored, this place he must really hate — a few minutes earlier. His replacement, Gabriel Jesus, wanted to take the penalty; his coach, Pep Guardiola, had other ideas.
Benjamin Mendy, the left back, was deputed to go and tell Jesus to desist. Guardiola had been impressed in training by Riyad Mahrez’s dedication to improving his penalty-taking technique. He would be given the ball, the chance to claim victory, to firmly establish Manchester City as the Premier League leader. That was final.
For a minute or so, Anfield waited. Alisson Becker, Liverpool’s goalkeeper, fidgeted on his line, like Rafael Nadal waiting for a serve: He adjusted his gloves, he bounced on his heels, he stretched his hamstrings, he adjusted his gloves, he bounced on his heels. Atkinson’s whistle blew again. Mahrez stepped up, and shot.
The ball was rising. The noise was so loud that Anfield shook, a roar from all four sides at once, crashing into each other, swelling and cresting like a wave.
The ball kept rising, over the bar. In the Main Stand, a little more refined, all of those who had started to leave rushed back. People hugged, and danced, and pumped their fists in the air.
The noise crackled and spat, expanding as it echoed around the stadium, growing more and more intense. Until that moment, Anfield had been quiet, tense, too consumed in its own nervousness to be its normal, raucous, boisterous self.
Every meeting between any of the Premier League’s elite teams is, these days, billed as a crucial showdown, a Super Sunday. Even by those standards, though, Manchester City’s visit to Anfield — the eighth game of the season, not even a quarter of the way in — had taken on an outsize significance.
It was Liverpool’s chance to prove that, this year, it has what it takes not just to compete with City in direct confrontation, but also over the course of the season. And it was City’s opportunity to prove its superiority, to lay to rest this idea — established during Liverpool’s three wins against Pep Guardiola’s team last season — that Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, somehow, had gotten inside Guardiola’s head.
It was the game from which the rest of the season would take its tone. Liverpool might demonstrate that City’s hegemony, so complete last year, was under genuine threat. Or, by winning at a stadium that has brought it nothing but misery recently, City would offer conclusive proof of its continuing, mounting excellence.
Most fans are inured to that, of course. They know that it is mostly hyperbole, marketing spiel, hot air. They know, deep down, that a 3-point lead in October is of marginal significance, in the context of the season. They know that the title is not won nor the campaign defined by 90 minutes in early autumn.
But it is easy to forget that in the heat of the moment. So as the ball kept rising, eventually thudding deep into the crowd behind Alisson’s goal, all of Anfield’s nerves, all of its anxiety, came pouring out in that great, defiant wave of noise.
Fans know, too, that the most delicately balanced games — as this was — are often decided by the finest of margins: by one inspired moment, by one mistake.
That is what they feared had happened. This was not the breathless, relentless showcase of Premier League values that had been trailed. Guardiola and Klopp know each other far too well for that. They are too keenly aware of the other’s strengths. They share, frankly, too much “respect,” to borrow Klopp’s word.
This was not the Liverpool of common imagination — swashbuckling, a little reckless, compelling — against the intricate, daring and brilliant Manchester City that Guardiola has crafted. Instead, it was two teams who knew that they must cede a little of their identity in order to prevent their opponent from expressing theirs.
City, usually so bewitching, was slow, contemplative, a little sterile, even. As Guardiola said, any team that tries to play an “open” game at this stadium, against this opponent, stands “less than 1 percent” chance of winning. Too much ambition at Anfield is dangerous.
Liverpool, in turn, was too conscious of the threat City posed to fizz with its usual intent. Klopp knows how Guardiola likes to score goals: one-twos on the edge of the box, or by working the ball to the byline, playing a low ball, giving someone a tap-in at the far post. Any mistake can be punished.
“To have a high rhythm, you need space,” Klopp said. “And neither team gave any space away.” The two most attack-minded teams in England, two teams managed by coaches who believe that soccer must be entertaining to have any purpose, knew they had to deprive themselves of oxygen to suffocate their opponent.
For 85 minutes, that is what both had done, giving the game the air of a final, a decider, winner-takes-all. Both teams played like they knew defeat would be the end of something; the feeling proved contagious, spreading to the fans. When Atkinson blew his whistle, most assumed Liverpool had blinked. That was it: Liverpool’s season, City’s season, everyone’s season turned here.
And then the ball kept rising, and Anfield shook with the noise: not the noise of triumph attained, but of hope revived. It had seemed as if the game had been taken away, and the season with it, and then, as Mahrez sank down, his head low, Liverpool suddenly had a reprieve, a license to continue to dream.
There was delirium, not because something had been decided, but because Liverpool felt, once more, as if nothing had, as if there is still everything to play for. It is only October, after all. Nothing is over yet.