Manchester City arrived at Anfield holding all the cards. Liverpool got home at 4:30am on Friday after losing on penalties in Istanbul. Their preparations for yesterday's game had been limited to some light recovery work. City had had 48 more hours to rest and prepare, and while Brendan Rodgers has more injured players than any other coach in the Premier League, Manuel Pellegrini could pick his strongest team.
As the sides lined up Pellegrini will have taken heart from the clear physical advantage enjoyed by his team: City’s spinal players towered over their Liverpool counterparts. Eliaquim Mangala, the most expensive defender in the history of English football, looked as though he could comfortably bench-press Liverpool’s three-man forward line.
Ten minutes in, it looked as though City had spent that extra 48 hours feeling sorry for themselves, while Liverpool were still running on adrenalin. The home side followed Barcelona’s lead in proving that while brute strength has its place, football is still all about movement, invention and collective purpose. Of these the last is most important: Liverpool had it, and City didn’t.
Liverpool's inspiration was again Philippe Coutinho, whom Rodgers had wisely decided to leave out of the trip to Turkey. The Brazilian supplied more evidence that he has evolved into the kind of player who can consistently decide big games.
Luis Suárez believed that Coutinho’s introduction to the Liverpool team in January 2013 set off their metamorphosis over the following 18 months from no-hopers to nearly-champions: “Philippe was incredible,” he wrote in his autobiography, “he changed us completely. He’s the one that gave us faith in having the ball because his technical ability is so good. You knew that he wouldn’t lose it, you knew that he would produce something special with it, that he would always choose the right pass.”
The problem with Coutinho when he first arrived, as Suárez noted, was his physical puniness: “He got tired very quickly in his first games for the club and had to be substituted.” Two years on, he has developed a wiry strength and resilience to underpin the exceptional dribbling and creative vision that had originally marked him out.
Now that he’s discovered how to shoot, the effect on Liverpool’s attacking potential could be profound. Previously, defenders could hang back when marking Coutinho because there was little risk of him punishing them with a dangerous shot at goal. If they’re now forced to close him down, they’re leaving more space for him to prod those passes in behind.
But even as performance as good as Coutinho’s would have meant nothing without the energetic support of several team-mates: Allen, Henderson, Lallana, Moreno, Sterling. The determination of the young Liverpool players was all the more impressive since they knew they had every excuse to fold.
Millionaire champions
But City folded first. With half an hour still to play, they already looked ready to settle for a draw. As Liverpool pressed for the win, City retreated into their shell. A team of millionaire champions were going through the motions – almost as though they were Sheikh Mansour’s slaves, if you can imagine such a thing.
It was a damaging defeat for Manuel Pellegrini. Last season, he lost most of the key matches: home and away to Chelsea, who were reckoned to be the main rivals at the start of the season; away to Liverpool with the title apparently at stake; at home to Bayern in the Champions League group stage; both legs of the second-round tie against Barcelona; the FA Cup semi-final to Wigan. This season has seen two draws with Chelsea and the same disappointing pattern of results in Europe. City play some great football when they're relaxed and there's little at stake, but they don't seem to be able to find performances to match the biggest occasions.
Pellegrini has lost the last two matches with a basic 4-4-2 system which suggests that under pressure, his selections are defined less by detailed consideration of the likely patterns of the game, than by a gambler’s faith in the ability of his forwards to outscore the opposition.
But whether City’s coach next season is Pellegrini or somebody else, he’ll need his players to start acting as though City is a cause worth suffering for, rather than just an incredibly well-paid job.
In the aftermath of defeat to Barcelona, some players had taken comfort in the inevitability of the City project’s progress.
"I think eventually we will get there," said Gael Clichy. "Those clubs [like Barcelona] have been built for several years, 20, 30, 40 years, and this is only the sixth season for us but that's no excuse."
Clichy’s words echoed the pre-match thoughts of his captain Vincent Kompany. “The history of this club tells you that in the past six years we always keep progressing,” Kompany said. Winning the Champions League was “only a matter of time.”
Clichy, Kompany and their team-mates need to forget about the broad sunlit uplands Manchester City are destined to reach, and start taking responsibility for what is actually happening on their watch. City won’t reach the top of the European game if their players continue to labour under the delusion that they’ll be carried there by the sheer spiritual momentum of their quest. There is nothing inevitable about the success of Manchester City. It’s up to guys like Clichy and Kompany to make it happen – not “eventually”, but now.
