So there it is. Manchester City have beaten Liverpool 3-0 at Anfield, so that should be an end to all the unpleasantness.
City have done their talking on the pitch. Let’s all move on.
Doesn’t work, does it? All feels quite dizzyingly odd to watch a Premier League game of this scale and significance and have no idea whether any of it actually meant anything at all.
Are these Conclusions even actually Conclusions? At the end of the day, is 16 Conclusions perhaps the real victim here?
1. It’s just… it… well, we… It just all feels very weird, doesn’t it? There really is no point trying to just analyse this as a football match. Clearly, we all kind of knew that going in. But just because you’ve been told in advance there’s going to be a f*cking great big elephant in a room, it’s still quite the sight when you open the door and there it is. A bloody great big elephant, with a couple of lads behind it holding a banner saying ‘CHEATS’ except the E has been replaced by a pound sign and also there are 114 of them.
No amount of preparation is going to make any of that seem normal.
2. And this is now the Premier League’s problem. Despite Micah Richards’ protestations and despite Man City’s defiant enjoyment of the ‘f*ck you’ middle finger they were able today to stick up to Liverpool, the Premier League and the country, this is not a club that can simply ‘do their talking on the pitch’.
We know they can do that. We know they will continue to do that. We wouldn’t be at all surprised after this effort if they continue to spend the rest of the season showing they are precisely what they currently look like: the best football team in the country.
But the actual point is that none of that actually matters. This was an emphatic win to maintain a perfect start to the season that was greeted by impassioned and unironic chants of ‘Going down’ from their opponents.
Football is at the best of times only ever the most important of the unimportant things. But what are Manchester City games now? The least important of the unimportant things? Nobody knows. Were these three points for the title race? Or the relegation battle? Or three months from now will they even exist at all?
And while obviously the absolute laser focus on City will fade a bit in time as the weeks go by, these are going to be the questions that are inevitably raised by every goal they score, every point they win. It’s a surreal experience.
We’ve seen plenty of criticism for the way Sky treated the game like it was a football match. Analysed it like just another game. They didn’t entirely ignore the elephant in the room – how could they? – but nor was it ever really decisively addressed, largely reduced to ‘noise’ or ‘atmosphere’ that the players had to cope with and prevail against.
With the excellent and honourable exception of whichever caption writer came up with ‘Defiantly Maybe’, Sky tried as much as possible to resist acknowledging the sheer scale to which this Product for which they have paid so handsomely is so utterly tainted and reduced until and unless City’s punishment lands, everything asterisked and caveated and TBC’d beyond the elastic limit of meaning anything.
Obviously it’s unlikely most people will be happy with the punishment, whatever it is. Too harsh, too soft, too small a benefit to my team, too great a benefit to that other team who I also hate, too specific, too broad. There is no Goldilocks stick with which City can be beaten to the satisfaction of all. But at least once there is a punishment we’ll all have a bit of context to work with again.
3. But perhaps the greatest tragedy is how this surreal lack of meaning is now retrofitted to so many other games between these two sides. Even before the City verdict, this would always have felt like a strange occasion as a Liverpool-City fixture featuring neither Pep Guardiola nor Jurgen Klopp for the first time in a decade.
Because for a good five years there in the middle of that decade this was the Premier League fixture. The grimmest consequence of City’s cheating isn’t that we don’t know what anything means now.
There’s even a kind of black humour to be found in the knowledge that City’s season could entirely feasibly end with them first, last or DNF in the Premier League table. We might not know what anything means at the moment, but at least we know that we don’t know.
Where the real loss is felt is in all those great battles and great games between them from the before times, none of which it turns out actually really happened.
4. So, having got all that out of the way, and grumbled about people trying to treat this like a football match, let’s go ahead and spend all the rest of these conclusions treating it like a football match.
5. One of the great things about the Premier League is that, no matter how much it may boil the p*ss of its ever-excited hype men, it remains gloriously, stubbornly resistant to it all. Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment in Barclays entertainment.
This game was so hyped, so huge, so big picture that it was almost impossible for a mere football match to deliver on it all.
But even with all that being said the first half was still a crushing anti-climax.
Liverpool never really made it as hostile off the pitch as you might have imagined. Three weeks of workshopping produced little more than shouting “CHEATS” quite a lot, with a sprinkling of “You know what you are”, some half-hearted “Going down” and a great deal of booing. And a few lads who’d taken advantage of a three-for-two offer on some kiddies’ birthday balloons up the Card Factory.
The players were roared into an inevitable fast start, and equally inevitably soon blew themselves out. Alexis Mac Allister was the man most visibly determined to play up to The Occasion, most memorably when responding to one early foul by trying to get a ruck going on the halfway line.
And when we say ruck, we mean literal rugby union style, not a generic scrap. Los Pumas’ loss was football’s gain.
6. There was some real, non-performative belly fire from Liverpool in those early exchanges, though, albeit largely contained and eventually extinguished by the provisional league leaders.
Ryan Gravenberch, who has not been a big winner of the Andoni Iraola era, was magnificent in the opening 20 minutes, rampaging around Anfield, all long limbs and nimble feet and surprising muscularity. Jamie Carragher may have got slightly carried away in declaring him the Heir of Vieira (Viheira?) but you could see where he was coming from.
Victor Munoz was a menace too in that impassioned beginning, and his running battle with Nico O’Reilly perhaps the one truly high-quality one-v-one contest of a first half that otherwise just felt all a little bit too 2026 Premier League (derogatory).
7. Indeed, with the exception of Munoz, the starting wingers for both sides were a deep source of disappointment, and a large slice of the reason why the game took so long to come close to the occasion.
While Gravenberch and Mac Allister, Enzo Fernandez and Elliot Anderson were all producing in the midfield, and the full-backs on both sides producing perhaps the standout first-half displays, the key playmakers weren’t doing their bit.
Bradley Barcola was particularly subdued, deeply hesitant in all he did. Poor old Florian Wirtz switched so decisively and instantly from Germany Wirtz back to Liverpool Wirtz that you have to wonder if it’s ever going to really happen for him here.
Antoine Semenyo, so memorably effective here last season for Bournemouth, flattered to deceive, and Iliman Ndiaye still carried the look of an Everton player cowed by the sheer history of going to Anfield.
Something had to give.
8. Something did. If we’re going to try and compartmentalise this into Just A Football Match, then it was one that came in two parts. The 55 minutes before Jeremy Doku came on for Ndiaye, and the 35 minutes after.
No matter how much the rest of the country might have wanted City given a bloody nose on the pitch, it would be hard to argue that second part didn’t have more to recommend it.
9. Within 12 minutes of Doku’s introduction, City were two goals and a man to the good, with Doku’s role in all three of those incidents absolutely pivotal.
He was the man carelessly fouled by an already-booked Gravenberch. He was the chief architect of Erling Haaland’s opening goal. And he scored the sumptuous second with one of those cut-inside-and-curl-it finishes that never disappoint. The best thing about them is often the sense that absolutely everyone in the ground knows exactly what’s about to happen from about three touches before it happens, but that nobody can do a single thing about it.
Those 12 minutes ended the game as a contest, with City having made as much as a point as they possibly can right now with on-field endeavour.
10. Given how furious a riled-up Anfield had been with things like ‘Nico O’Reilly pinching a yard or two when taking a throw-in’ – the visible response from the first few rows akin to something like ‘First all the corruption, and now this’ – we don’t really expect too much rational response to the red card.
And you know what? Fair enough. If we’ve already accepted the futility of trying to treat this whole afternoon as just another football match, then it must logically apply too to the key incidents within.
But there was, in truth, no great injustice here. No grand scandal. No smoking-gun evidence of anything at all. What there was, was one very soft yellow card followed by a moderately cynical, counter-halting foul that always gets a yellow card.
The extent of any Liverpool grievance here can probably extend to the likelihood that, had Gravenberch committed the exact same two fouls the other way round, he would have remained on the pitch. The counter is that, in a world where he’s already been booked, committing the foul he did and where he did was always Giving The Referee A Decision To Make.
One other thing we would say here is that we can still see why Gravenberch went for it. One of Doku’s great gifts is making opponents think they can nick the ball away from him, before realising far too late that they’ve been had.
11. Such was the completeness with which the game changed, we’d argue that Doku’s arrival had far more to do with it than Gravenberch’s departure. Some teams are easier to play against with 10 men than others; one doesn’t, for instance, have to look very far from Man City’s home to find one of the easier ones.
City are not easy to play against with 10 men. But Liverpool could still have tried. It might be harsh, but when a midfielder is sent off it always feels more reasonable to see that impair attacking effort than so thoroughly unmoor the defensive one.
Liverpool never came close to regaining any kind of defensive shape until it was far, far too late.
12. Doku was rampant, marauding forward in classic Makes Things Happen fashion that means the slice of luck in how his cross made it all the way via a deflection for Haaland to sweep home with disarming power shortly after a bad miss feels irrelevant.
When Doku is in this mood he is yer classic force of nature, willing opportunities into being. Before the game, Jamie Carragher billed it as ‘Control v Chaos’ as he urged Liverpool to bring the chaos in what was, even when everything else was stripped away, a day when their injury-hit side was conspicuously outmatched.
Yet what truly tilted a pretty even game City’s way was the introduction of their own agent of chaos.
13. If indeed this is all a meaningless gesture of defiance from City, the third goal from Rayan Cherki will go down as one of our very favourite meaningless things that didn’t actually happen.
Liverpool’s race was run by that point, of course. They put a lot of energy into the game for very little return and were now almost entirely out of puff. But still, a 90-second spell of possession in which every single City player touched the ball before nominal left-back Josko Gvardiol teed up Cherki with a behind the legs flick before Cherki simply refused to score until he’d sent Jeremie Frimpong sliding all the way out of Anfield was outrageous stuff.
We’ve already said the whole point is that City simply cannot in any meaningful way ‘do their talking on the pitch’ but by the time Cherki was celebrating his own mischievous, impudent genius by giving Anfield the side-eye we did feel our position shift from ‘fire City directly into the sun’ to ‘Ah, let them off with a warning. Look at that hangdog expression, they’ve learned their lesson. Let’s get them a present.’
Fundamentally, we find it very hard to stay mad at Haaland, Doku or Cherki. City played this perfectly.
14. Doku broke the game apart, but City’s best player on the day was their best player this season. Elliot Anderson. The doubts about his nine-figure transfer fee are rather different doubts now to the ones being aired back in the summer.
In being the chosen one to replace Rodri, he arguably had as tough a task as Enzo Maresca did in trying to replace Pep Guardiola.
And he has been magnificent. Within his first six Premier League games as City’s new midfield lynchpin he has produced a man-of-the-match performance as 10-man City won at Old Trafford and now another as City’s players stepped into a uniquely challenging environment on a uniquely challenging afternoon at Anfield.
Those are two pretty huge occasions and difficult situations at the most telling possible grounds for a new City player to have so spectacularly delivered the goods.
His all-round play from the quiet efficiency of his passing to his absolute willingness to mix it with anyone physically is already marking him out as a key man in this new City side, even if neither he nor we have any clue what any of it is actually going to be worth in the end.
And it’s all the more remarkable given the United game was the first time Anderson had ever played in a derby game at first-team level. He is proving to be absolutely built for them.
15. Caveats and excuses abound for Liverpool, but having lost what was already a pretty unconvincing unbeaten record there should now be some question marks about this team and how their season is shaping up. We might not know what’s going to happen to City this season, but we can already say with a fair amount of confidence that if there is indeed a lucky loser to be collecting a Premier League trophy at the end of this season because City’s points have been taken off them, then it won’t be Liverpool.
Iraola is not yet getting enough out of enough of these Liverpool players, and the lack of a meaningful response to the red card until it was already far, far too late is not a good look.
16. But we really are struggling to feel anything much about these conclusions when it’s just so hard to know what any of it means. We’re left with competing senses that the Premier League have to act quickly to avoid this discombobulating sensation overwhelming all City’s games and by extension the entire league season for months on end with the undeniable fact that City running away at the top of the table, the elephant growing larger and larger, the room smaller and smaller as nothing decisive happened for absolutely ages is bleakly funny in a way the Premier League kind of deserves.
Maybe there really is no moral to this story. Maybe it really is just a bunch of stuff that happened. Or didn’t.
