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The players walk onto the field, with Erling Haaland making a point of applauding the away end. ALL OF YOUR STATS ARE FADING AWAY is another of the banners being shown on the TV coverage.
One of the many banners being held up by Liverpool fans reads YOU’RE NOT REALLY HERE, with various trophies crossed out. It’s hard to make out the chants, but it’s fair to say there isn’t a surfeit of bonhomie.
This is the updated Premier League table. City will stay top unless they are hammered. Liverpool can go fourth with a win.
Here’s our match report from the MKM Stadium, where Hull continued their impressive start with a 2-2 draw against Everton.
Andoni Iraola’s pre-match interview
[On why he picked Lewis Koumas] His performances, how he’s training, how he’s giving everything for the team. I trust that he can give us a good threat for City.
He’s very mobile, very forward. He can play all the positions; he can play wide, attack the spaces. I think he’s quite complete. He’s still young, but these sorts of games will be very good for his development.
We have some injuries but I trust my team 100%. I think the atmosphere will be good for us – but first we have to do our job.
[On the absence of Dominik Szoboszlai] He came from the international break with a tight hamstring. He trained but was not feeling 100%. We will have to wait for Dom.
There were hearty boos when City came out to warm up, but that aside it doesn’t sound particularly hostile. Yet.
“I met a friend of mine last night who is a City fan,” says Niall Mullen. “He was genuinely upset about people giving him grief about City being judged to have cheated. Just as upset as he was happy when they won all the trophies and did the Poznan. Life comes at you fast. Or in this case incredibly slowly with a pending appeal.”
Did you nick that last line from Ferris Bueller?
Enzo Maresca’s pre-match interview
The mood is good, the mindset is good. Now it’s time to start the game – finally!
[A sense of togetherness] is very important; the mix between the players and the fans, everyone.
We are away in a complicated environment, a complicated stadium, but we are going to try do our best to win the game. It will be an intense game.
[Was everything okay on the journey into Anfield?] Yeah, absolutely. It was all good.
“Afternoon Rob,” writes Tim Woods. “A lot of talk these past few weeks about how City fans aren’t to blame. I agree, but only because the fans of any other club would be doing exactly the same. Blindly defending your team is part of the game; I am sure I can recall conversations with other Liverpool fans in which the phrase ‘yeah, but he’s only done it twice’ was used in relation to our favourite hungry Uruguayan. What is it about football that makes us behave so ridiculously?”
Will Unwin
An update from Will Unwin, who is part of our team at Anfield for today’s game
A group of over 600 Manchester City fans were given a police escort across Stanley Park, chanting as they went about their owners and throwing abuse back at any Liverpool fans who took issue. The message was a clear one of defiance from the hardcore away support.
Premier League results
Jamie Jackson
Enzo Maresca’s first public display since Manchester City were found guilty on virtually all counts of breaching Premier League financial rules was controlled – apart from the sole, and telling, slip-up of his very first answer.
In Thursday’s pre-emptive PR move, the club had Maresca tell their channels that he was aware of the “noise” around City. Fast forward 24 hours, and to a packed media conference of 45 attendees – around a threefold increase on the norm – at the Etihad Campus, the Italian was asked if this was dismissive of the anger felt towards the club’s cheating. “I understand the reason why most of you are here but the only thing I can say is that there is a process ongoing and in this moment I completely trust the club,” he replied.
This correspondent’s radar bleeped at the use of “in this moment” and, when the microphone was passed, Maresca was quizzed if this meant he may change his mind. “Sorry, that was the wrong answer. I completely trust the club in this moment, in the future, always.” But there was no denying the initial response and how this points to these shaky times for all at City.
Max Rushden
It’s Wednesday afternoon (UK time) and I find myself interviewing Tony Hadley on TalkSport about his upcoming big band tour. We play a bit of Spandau Ballet, chat about the classics and his career – hanging out with Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. In as much as you can deduce in a 10-minute chat on Zoom, Tony seems like an absolute gent.
We do always try to bring it back to sport – Tony is an Arsenal fan, there’s a bit of Arteta, Leeds at the weekend. Tony brings up Billy Bremner and suggests that my co-host Charlie Baker and I are too young to remember him playing. We are, and how wonderful to be called young.
Right at the end I go for a slightly cumbersome question/joke about Manchester City. “And I know Manchester City are top of the league, but they’ll probably be bottom of the league by the end of the season?”
Hadley is a pro. Maybe he’s been waiting for this hardball question about the charges. “You just never know what’s going to happen – the world is a crazy place. I’ve got to add to all the big band songs we’re doing … at the end we do a Christmas catalogue which is great fun as well.” What a sidestep.
Jonathan Wilson
Football, the world’s most popular sport, played by laws drawn up in London in 1863. The Premier League is the UK’s greatest soft power export. Premier League clubs are owned by a deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, a billionaire based in Monaco for tax reasons and a disappointing assortment of investors and private equity funds. And what, really, could be more British than that? Football truly is the national game.
What the Manchester City case has exposed is just how difficult it is to regulate some of the richest and most powerful bodies in the world. While the wait for the verdict was frustrating, it’s perhaps unavoidable given the possibility of legal objection at every turn when a leaked email from City’s in-house lawyer during Uefa’s action against the club had threatened to “spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years”. You didn’t get that with Albert Alexander Sr or Peter Swales.
Team news
Lewis Koumas, 21, makes his full Premier League debut for Liverpool, who are without Alexander Isak, Cody Gakpo and Dominik Szoboszlai. Ryan Gravenberch and Victor Munoz also come into the side.
Manchester City make one change from their 5-3 win over Sunderland before the international break: Nico O’Reilly replaces Josko Gvardiol at left-back.
Liverpool (4-2-3-1) Alisson; Araujo, Jacquet, Van Dirk, Kerkez; Gravenberch, Mac Allister; Munoz, Wirtz, Barcola; Koumas.
Subs: Mamardashvili, Gomez, Endo, Chiesa, Tsimikas, Frimpong, Nyoni, McConnell, Ngumoha.
Man City (4-2-3-1) Donnarumma; Nunes, Dias, Guehi, O’Reilly; Anderson, Enzo; Semenyo, Cherki, Ndiaye; Haaland.
Subs: Rulli, Kovacic, Doku, Reis, Gvardiol, Bouaddi, Allan, Khusanov, Lewis.
Referee Chris Kavanagh.
John Brewin
A four-match international break has presented a stress test. “The intensity of the squad, the athleticism of it, really, I think it’s designed for the elite,” said the Wales head coach, Craig Bellamy, on the completion of four matches in 11 days. Elite club coaches would disagree. The Nations League and the wider set of international games staged across the globe have been accompanied by a daily list of casualties, club officials viewing matches through their fingers as players pull up and gesture to the bench.
Almost certainly to the disquiet of Enzo Maresca, City’s Elliot Anderson and Marc Guéhi were, alongside Harry Kane, the only England players to start all four Nations League matches, with Nico O’Reilly withdrawing halfway through. Liverpool’s problems appear to run deeper, with Alexander Isak and Cody Gakpo, early successes for the Andoni Iraola regime, sustaining injuries with Sweden and the Netherlands respectively. Jérémy Jacquet, another bright spark this season, reportedly strained a hamstring with France.
Will Unwin
It was quiet around Anfield three hours before kick-off but there is a sense of what is to come. For £15 you can buy a ‘Guilty’ flag, depicting the City squad in jail or a ‘Cheats’ banner riffing off Oasis’s own style. What larks.
Barney Ronay
The internet: an apology. It turns out you were right. It was actually a simulation all along. Now, talk to me about chemtrails again. And yes, maybe Vinícius Júnior has been replaced by a handsome, baffled-looking waxwork.
Welcome to the weirdest weekend of them all. We are now post-judgment, post-statement, postlapsarian. As the Premier League prepares to snap back into what must be described, out of habit, as reality, armed with the knowledge its serial champions have been the authors of a 10-year sham supremacy, the first question is fairly simple. How is it going to feel?
There is no precedent for this. Even the state of total confusion feels brittle given City maintain their complete state of innocence and deny all charges. We await the release of Irrefutable Body of Evidence, the great lost Madonna erotic thriller sequel, presumably recast around a steamy three-year regulatory tribunal scenario.
Preamble
Of all the gin joints in the all the towns in all the world …
Manchester City’s first game after being found guilty of more than a hundred Premier League charges could have been anywhere: the Etihad, the Gtech Stadium, Portman Road, even Priestfield in the Carabao Cup. Instead, the great scriptwriter in the sky has decided it should be at Anfield – home of Liverpool, their biggest modern rivals and the team most affected by City’s success in the last 15 years. The atmosphere is always febrile when City visit Anfield; today, it will be off the charts.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a good time for City to play Liverpool. They have won five out of five in the Premier League, whereas Liverpool are still learning to speak Andoni Iraola’s coaching language and will be without both Alexander Isak and Cody Gakpo.
You don’t need a PhD in rocket science to know these are not normal circumstances. To many people, this isn’t so much a football match as a public shaming. City will try to focus exclusively on the football – partly because they believe they have irrefutable proof of their innocence, partly because anyone who wants to finish above Arsenal this season needs every point they can get.
Nobody, not even Biff Tannen, knows what’s going to happen over the next few hours. The only certainty is that there will be banners, banter and bile. In almost 140 years of English league football, there has never been a game like this.
Kick off 4.30pm BST.
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