Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Sunday afternoon at Anfield was how ordinary it all felt. Everybody came for something apocalyptic and what they got was a league game that felt like pretty much any other league game in which Liverpool beat a side who aren’t as good as them. For a time there was a thought that Liverpool might pay for failing to take advantage of their early domination, for missing decent chances. But Manchester City are no longer the almost supernatural force they once were; eventually they made two mistakes in quick succession, giving away first possession and then a penalty, and the game was Liverpool’s.
Even Pep Guardiola seems to have accepted it is over. After the – frankly uncomfortable – sight of him clawing at his own scalp on Tuesday as they tossed away a three-goal lead against Feyenoord, he responded to chants of “You’re getting sacked in the morning” by grinning and raising six fingers to denote the number of Premier League titles he has won. Unfortunately, it also denotes how many of their last seven games City have lost.
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All of which raises two questions. Firstly, can anybody stop Liverpool, who have won 18 games in 20 games under Arne Slot? And secondly, in what circumstances might Guardiola actually be sacked?
So far, Slot has a habit of playing teams just as they hit a slump in form. It’s not to diminish what he has achieved at Anfield to point out that he’s also been a lucky manager. But equally, a lot of the reason Liverpool’s opponents have not been at their best is that they’ve been playing Liverpool, who seem to have found a very happy middle ground in which they have many of the qualities of Jürgen Klopp’s sides without some of the recklessness.
Few managers have left a club in quite as good a state as Klopp did. Most depart when the structure is broken, but Klopp had begun the process of rebuilding, reshaping his forward line and midfield over his last couple of seasons. Slot, it should not be forgotten, has done this without adding a single player; which, as Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil van Dijk and Mohamed Salah approach the end of their contracts, may by next season have become problematic. Yet he did not leave a side that had been so successful recently that the path led inevitably downwards. After four successive City titles, there has been no reason for anybody at Liverpool to be resistant to change. Slot has played the political game well, always paying appropriate deference to Klopp while tweaking to make Liverpool play a slightly more conservative style.
At the same time, there have been repeated occasions this season when he has made changes that have had a clear positive effect. Almost the default pattern for a Liverpool match has been a slightly featureless first half followed by a second in which they score a couple of goals. Against Ipswich, Wolves, Chelsea, Arsenal, Brighton, Bayer Leverkusen, Southampton and Real Madrid, Liverpool improved after Slot’s in-game tinkering. That is a hugely impressive hit rate, and suggests a manager not merely extremely adept at reading the game tactically but decisive in acting upon that.
Liverpool’s lead over Chelsea and Arsenal is nine points with 25 games to go. It would be too early to say the race is over, even if we knew how they handle life when fortune turns on them, but that is an extremely healthy advantage, particularly given there is no reason to expect either Chelsea or Arsenal suddenly to embark on a remorseless winning spree – although Arsenal have already played their away games against five of the other six teams who finished in the top seven last season.
And could Guardiola be sacked? It seems unthinkable. For most of the past 16 years he has been obviously the best coach in the world. Long before he got to City, the club was built to his vision. To break from that would be a seismic act for the club’s owners, far greater than, say, Leicester offloading Claudio Ranieri or Chelsea dismissing José Mourinho in the months after they won a title, especially as City fight the Premier League charges.
But equally, history shows that once the magic has gone in football, it is very hard to get it back (look at Inter in 1966-67, dominant and seemingly en route to a Treble only, abruptly to lose form, winning only two of their final 11 games of the season to end up with nothing; Helenio Herrera was given another season, in which they finished fifth).
In a month, City’s aura has vanished, but who realistically looks a better candidate than Guardiola to restore it? So long as he feels sufficiently energised, he will surely be afforded that opportunity. But what resources he has to do that will probably depend, like so much else, on the outcome of the Premier League charges against the club.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email soccerwithjw@theguardian.com, and he’ll answer the best in a future edition
