Gavin Cooney

AS THE MANCHESTER City players dawdled on the field at the end of Tuesday’s three-goal collapse and draw against Feyenoord, their faces plastered with shock, it was as if they were reluctant to return to the dressing room. 

What the f**k is Pep going to say now?

Not that Guardiola was hiding his emotion across a game in which City ended a losing run in a manner that felt worse than all the previous defeats. He cradled his head in his hands after City conceded the first of their three goals, and then appeared on television with his nose cut and his head covered in scratches. 

What is it about the manager now flaying in his own skin in public that makes us think he may not be the most reassuring leader in a crisis? 

We have now entered an unknown territory across Guardiola’s long and preposterously successful career.

Never before had he lost four straight games in all competitions. 

Never before had he lost five straight games in all competitions. 

Never before had his side lost a three-goal lead in a game. 

So for the first time, Guardiola is being asked to haul a team out of a period of genuine crisis. Can he do it? His touchline behaviour on Tuesday suggests he is compounding the problem, rather than alleviating it. 

City usually have a kind of Autumn stumble, where they show enough vulnerability to give their rivals lousy, painful hope before Guardiola alights upon the right tactical fix and City then roar home from February. This year, however, the issues are far more profound. Guardiola is not tweaking things on a chess board this time around. No, he’s now trying to bail out water and then plug the gaps of a sinking ship. 

And unfortunately for Guardiola, the last port you want in a storm is Anfield, which is where City head on Sunday, playing not to get an edge on their great rivals but merely to cling in the title race. Eight points is a big gap to bridge even from the first day of December, but 11 points would be insurmountable. 

Anfield will be stormy and wild on Sunday, as the Liverpool crowd will sense a shot at their uniquely raucous kind of catharsis, and a chance to land the final, exorcising blow to the team that has haunted them for years. 

The biggest single reason for City’s astonishing run of results is the most obvious: Rodri’s absence. You can see a Rodri-shaped hole in City’s midfield when they don’t have the ball, but his absence is more keenly felt with the ball. 

Rodri explained his role in an interview with the Guardian in July, saying it’s his job to know “when to accelerate, when to brake, when to press higher, when to move deeper.”

He sets the tempo and thus makes many of his team-mates’ decisions for them, and so it’s unsurprising to see them looking hassled, harried and generally lost without him. It’s only in his absence that City could be caught on the counter while leading Feyenoord with one minute remaining. 

The last champion team to suffer a single injury as significant was of course Liverpool, when Virgil van Dijk had his knee blown out by Jordan Pickford. Their record after Van Dijk was injured, though, wasn’t actually that bad: they didn’t lose from September until the following January, and were top at Christmas when they beat Crystal Palace 7-0.

But the collapse came when Van Dijk’s deputies were injured, perhaps caused by the added strain of covering Van Dijk’s workload. Liverpool were eventually forced to play the likes of Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, and Ozan Kabak in central defence, and their title defence was ended. 

City’s equivalent injuries have followed much more quickly, with Mateo Kovacic now out as well. Injuries to centre-backs Ruben Dias and Nathan Ake have meanwhile robbed Guardiola of the chance to play John Stones and/or Manuel Akanji in midfield. 

Liverpool should recognise City’s other major problem: they are a champion team who have grown old together.

This, in fairness, is the condition of all great teams, and perhaps the only manager ever to figure out this problem was Jim Gavin, who won successive All-Ireland titles with Dublin while lowering the average age of the team each year. 

It’s all very easy to acknowledge this in hindsight, but City should have conducted more surgery to their team in the wake of the treble victory.

Rodri's injury, which threatens to become the defining image of Manchester City's season. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Instead they allowed Cole Palmer to join Chelsea and failed to meaningfully address other problem areas in the squad. They are struggling for alternatives to the flagging Kyle Walker at right-back, and they have spent years not finding a deputy for Rodri. 

The decision to allow Julian Alvarez to leave in the summer looked odd at the time and now appears totally bizarre, though this has been exacerbated by Oscar Bobb’s long-term injury.

And while the decision to narrow the goalscoring burden upon Erling Haaland has worked to date, it has the major downside of only working for as long as Haaland is scoring. If he cools off, then City are exposed. While he has a still-outstanding 12 goals in 12 league games this year, City’s next highest scorers are Gvardiol and Kovacic, each with three. 

Liverpool have undergone the pain of their great team ageing together, and thus vast chunks of their great team are now wearing out their days in Saudi Arabia. The team has been refreshed though remains reliant on Van Dijk and Mohamed Salah, who has either scored or assisted two-thirds of Liverpool’s league goals this season. Hence the difficulty of their contract negotiations: Liverpool have to try and balance their brilliance and their importance to the team against the date at which they grow too old, and the club are then taking the pelters City now take, for not rebuilding from a position of strength. 

Liverpool’s problems, though, are for the future, if indeed they are problems at all. 

City’s are immediate and profound, and in being asked to solve them, Guardiola is facing a challenge he has never faced before.