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.
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.