Man City v Liverpool is like Federer v Nadal, says Klopp
Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp listened intently as the statistics were read out. The number of Premier League games played by Liverpool since August 2018, followed by the number of wins, draws and losses, with the pattern then repeated for Manchester City.
It took a while to get to the point. And yet, in the end, there it was, the only thing that separates these protagonists: Liverpool have amassed 337 points to City’s 338 over that sample size, and, boiling it down to this season, it is 72 versus 73. Fine margins define their relationship.
“I’m surprised about the numbers,” the Liverpool manager said. “They wouldn’t have the points they have if we weren’t there and the same if the other way around.
“Man City is considered the best football team in the world, I think they are as well, and they got one point more than us. What does that say? Exactly.”
It was an example of mind games, but not as we have come to know it. Instead of undermining the opposition, the chance was taken to build City up in the knowledge that Liverpool’s players could, in the process, receive a boost of their own.
As the rivalry prepares to play out at The Etihad on Sunday, Klopp likened it to that seen on the grand-slam courts between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, before conceding that four years ago he was not convinced the gap could be closed. Perhaps such reticence was born out of experience.
However, the weight of history left those battles lopsided. Liverpool have provided Klopp with a stable environment in which he has been able to showcase fully his coaching acumen, rather than fretting about losing his best players (Mario Götze and Robert Lewandowski, for example, would move to Bayern).
And while there is a part of Klopp that will always like the story of the underdog, he knows Liverpool now possess a ferocious bite.
“Equal? I’m not sure,” he said. “The main difference between Dortmund-Bayern and Liverpool-City is that at Dortmund we lost important players every year. Bayern never.
“If you played an outstanding season at Dortmund, there were a lot of clubs who could be interested and very often it was Bayern themselves. That’s the difference in the situation, clearly.
“We [Liverpool] are much more equal [with City] at least than we [Dortmund] were with Bayern. That’s definitely the case because we could develop and build on what we did before. We had last year, which was not great, but even that we could build on because we knew why it happened.”
Those building blocks have constructed a formidable squad, albeit in a different way from City. Luis Díaz, Diogo Jota and Thiago Alcântara, Guardiola’s former favourite at Bayern, have all been signed by Klopp over the past 20 months for less than the £100 million splurged on Jack Grealish.
Indeed, Liverpool boast such rounded attacking riches in Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, Jota and Díaz that various permutations have their merits.
