Liverpool near perfection as Manchester City's storm continues

The buzzword at Anfield on Sunday evening was “perfect”. A perfect start on Merseyside for Arne Slot; another near-perfect game from his Liverpool team; a mighty opponent, Manchester City, not just brought down to earth but engulfed by what looks like a perfect storm.

There can be no such thing as perfection in a team sport with as many variables as football, but for Liverpool, the past week has brought something close to it, beating Real Madrid 2-0 in the Champions League on Wednesday before defeating City by the same score four days later to move nine points clear at the top of the Premier League.

Slot felt there was still room for improvement after the victory against Madrid. Against City, he got it.

“If you want to win against Manchester City, you have to be perfect in every part of the game — high press, low press, build-up, every part — because they bring so many problems to you,” the Liverpool head coach said. “We weren’t perfect, but we came close to perfection.”

That cannot mean every pass, every tackle, every decision, but it means reaching such a heightened level of individual and collective performance that a group of players look in total control of their destiny. When Virgil van Dijk is so imperious in central defence, when Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch are making light of that summer-long search for midfield reinforcements, when Cody Gakpo and Luis Diaz look so much surer of their movements in attack, when Mohamed Salah appears intent on rewriting the record books, when understudies Caoimhin Kelleher, Conor Bradley and Joe Gomez step up to make crucial contributions, when the whole thing is running so smoothly, you get spells like this.

It has been an extraordinary start to Slot’s tenure. It looked a tough gig, taking over from Jurgen Klopp and then enduring what seemed a dispiriting first summer in the transfer market, but he brought with him a clean slate, a sense of calm authority and a clarity of vision and structure that has led them to 18 wins, one draw and one defeat in 20 matches in all competitions.

Slot was asked afterwards whether he could believe how well things are going. “I can believe because it’s happening, but I don’t think anyone, including me, would have predicted this,” he told Sky Sports. “Jurgen left the team in a very good place, but to win so much, with all the difficult things we’ve faced already, is something we couldn’t predict before the season.”

Nor would anyone have predicted that City would find themselves in this mess: four straight defeats in the Premier League, six defeats out of seven in all competitions, an all-conquering team stripped of its aura and a brilliant coach, Pep Guardiola, looking bewildered and seemingly wondering where all of this is going to end.

Not at Anfield, that was for sure. Not against a team as ruthless and unyielding as Liverpool look right now.

From the first whistle, setting an extremely high tempo, forcing City into mistakes and rushing into a 12th-minute lead through Gakpo, they made it abundantly clear that this would be a match played on their terms.

Even when City found more stability and possession in the second half, they were kept at arm’s length. Liverpool, always dangerous on the counter-attack, should have been home and dry long before Salah made it 2-0 from the penalty spot on 78 minutes.

In City’s previous four matches (against Sporting CP, Brighton & Hove Albion, Tottenham Hotspur and Feyenoord), they had conceded a second goal a maximum of eight minutes after the first. In three of those four games, they did so from a winning position. That they held on until the closing stages against Liverpool might even have felt to Guardiola like progress. Small mercies and all that.

Guardiola gave that impression in his post-match press conference, talking of a step in the right direction, something to build on — but it was startling to hear him sound so fixated on his team’s weaknesses: “We don’t have the pace in the middle right now and they (Liverpool) are stronger in the duels. You have to survive with the ball.

“We’re not good in transitions over 30-40 metres compared to them. We cannot compete against Liverpool, a transitional team, because they are so fast and stronger than us in those positions.”

Based on what we saw, Guardiola’s assessment was accurate, but it begged questions about what exactly he felt the players he picked would do against Liverpool. With Matheus Nunes, a midfielder, and Rico Lewis, a full-back-cum-midfielder, chosen on the wings, it looked like a team selection conceived to maximise solidity and ball retention, but City had little of either in the first half and their attacking threat was non-existent. They didn’t manage a shot until a tame effort from Lewis in the 39th minute.

Rodri’s absence is at the root of City’s problems, with his anterior cruciate ligament injury expected to rule him out for the rest of the season, but it is far from the only issue. This is a team crying out for new energy. Kyle Walker, their 34-year-old captain, has struggled all season and was among those culpable for both Liverpool goals, losing track of Gakpo at the far post for the first and then being dispossessed by Luis Diaz to compound a Ruben Dias error in the build-up to the penalty.

Ilkay Gundogan, also 34, looks a shadow of the player who left for Barcelona with City’s blessing 18 months ago; even at 33, Kevin De Bruyne looks their best bet for creative inspiration, but he has been restricted to five brief appearances from the bench since recovering from a groin injury.

Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, Bernardo Silva and Savinho are yet to score in the Premier League this season. Jeremy Doku has scored once. The days when City’s attacking threat would come from all angles feel far away.

Erling Haaland has carried their goalscoring almost single-handedly this season, scoring 17 goals in all competitions, but this was another of those games where he offers so little in general play. That might not be a concern when the rest of the team is functioning, but he completed just seven passes in the entire game against Liverpool (see below) and failed to win a single ground or aerial duel against Van Dijk or Gomez. On days like this, his presence as the team’s focal point seems so strange, at odds with much that Guardiola stands — or stood — for.

The contrast between the two teams was huge. Liverpool had Trent Alexander-Arnold not just defending far more rigorously than Walker, his opposite number, but carrying a creative threat from right-back; Mac Allister and Gravenberch looked like the type of midfielders City should have gone for instead of Kalvin Phillips and Nunes; Dominik Szoboszlai, who did not come close to Foden’s contribution in the Premier League last season, looked the more reliable, inspirational footballer here; Diaz and Gakpo bring an incisiveness and energy that has been absent from City’s attacking play so often this season; Haaland has scored more goals this season, but Salah’s impact, in producing big moments week after week, has been far greater.

It seemed telling that even former City and England defender Micah Richards, a club ambassador, was so blunt in saying how standards seem to have dropped in Guardiola’s team. On Sky Sports, he called them “disjointed”, saying City looked less “together” than Liverpool and “everything was a yard off”.

He was particularly scathing of Walker’s defending for the first goal, pointing not only to the captain’s initial positioning, but to the way that, having got back into place at the far post, he was caught ball-watching when Gakpo stole in to convert Salah’s cross.

“It’s one of those where you constantly think your pace is going to get you out of trouble,” Richards said. “And when you get older and you start losing your pace…”

Despite describing their overall prospects as “bleak”, Richards could not bring himself to write off City’s title hopes — but from this point, they will need to be near-perfect if they are to force their way back into contention. It is one thing to expect an upturn in performance, starting at home to Nottingham Forest on Wednesday, but even if City regain momentum, there is so much lost ground to make up.

During the October international break, a common view was that the next 10 games or so — against Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton & Hove Albion, Aston Villa, Southampton and Manchester City in the Premier League, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen and Real Madrid in the Champions League, and Brighton again in the Carabao Cup — would give a clearer measure of this Liverpool team.

Nine wins and one draw later, they stand top of the Champions League standings and through to the Carabao Cup quarter-final as well as boasting 34 points from a possible 39 in the Premier League.

Only once in the Premier League era has a team (Manchester United in 1993-94, 11 points) had a bigger lead at this stage.

Of the 11 teams who previously took at least 33 points from their first 13 games of a Premier League season, only one failed to go and win the title. That was Liverpool in 2018-19 when they lost just once all season but finished with 97 points to City’s dizzying total of 98. That prompted Klopp’s suggestion that any team hoping to beat Guardiola’s team to the title would have to be close to perfect — a challenge his players rose to the following season.

Even if City pick up considerably over the coming months, it will not take a flawless campaign to finish above them this time — but in some ways, their plight serves as a cautionary tale for Liverpool.

Going into their game at Bournemouth on November 2, every bookmaker and just about every data-based prediction model had Guardiola’s team down as favourites to win the title for a fifth successive season.

By the final whistle at Anfield on Sunday, Opta’s model gave City a 4.4 per cent chance of winning the Premier League, Arsenal 9.8 per cent and Liverpool an 85.1 per cent chance.

Liverpool's 2-0 victory over Manchester City has seen them increase their grip on the Premier League title.

Their win % is now up to 85.1% with the Opta supercomputer ????

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— Opta Analyst (@OptaAnalyst) December 1, 2024

That seems rather high with so much of the race to be run. Twists and turns are still likely and City’s travails offer a reminder of how quickly things can change and how damaging it can be if one setback is followed quickly by another.

Liverpool had a taste of that last season, top of the table in early April with the Carabao Cup already won, only for their much-hyped quest for glory on four fronts to unravel quickly in the campaign’s closing weeks.

There was always something frantic about their efforts in their final season under Klopp: too many gaps in midfield and defence, too many soft goals conceded, too much time spent living on their nerves, too much energy spent chasing results rather than playing games on their terms.

This season, under Slot, they look like a different animal. More focused, more controlled, more measured — not flawless, but tireless in their work and remarkably serene in their progress.

(Top photo: Nikki Dyer/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

Before joining The Athletic as a senior writer in 2019, Oliver Kay spent 19 years working for The Times, the last ten of them as chief football correspondent. He is the author of the award-winning book Forever Young: The Story of Adrian Doherty, Football’s Lost Genius. Follow Oliver on Twitter @OliverKay