The gloriously chaotic affair that was Liverpool v Manchester City

You’d have got extremely short odds on touchline micro-management’s Pep Guardiola spending an uninterrupted 20 minutes sitting in thoughtful repose in the visitors’ dug-out at Anfield on Sunday, but he did exactly that before the game kicked off. As he surveyed Liverpool’s stadium, a towering edifice that seems to occupy a peculiar rent-free space in his head, The Fiver imagines he was envisaging potential scenarios that might unfold once the game began. When it ended and his intricate gameplan had been ruthlessly exposed by an agricultural late-80s-era Wimbledon long ball up the centre from Allison Beasant to Mo Fashanu, he laid the blame for his side’s defeat squarely at the Shankly Gates of his concrete nemesis.

“This is Anfield,” he told one reporter after another, as if to suggest there are some malign forces at work that have prevented his Manchester City side from winning on seven of the eight occasions they have played there. It’s also worth noting that while the stadium they played in on the one occasion they did win was also undeniably Anfield, it was a desolate, bleak, empty, mid-lockdown Anfield which – let’s face it – is no Anfield at all.

Strip away all the toxic grimness – Hillsborough chants and graffiti in the away concourse, thrown coins and reported acts of post-match vandalism on the City team bus, all of which hopefully won’t go unpunished – and this game was the kind of gloriously chaotic affair which could have gone either way but ultimately went Liverpool’s because This Is Anfield, where goals scored by visitors get unfairly and routinely ruled out on the grounds of such pedantic nitpickery as – Fiver checks notes – multiple clear fouls in the build-up because somebody staring at a telly 213 miles