For an hour on Sunday, Anfield got the game it wanted. Noisy, scrappy, nothing settled. Then Ryan Gravenberch picked up a second yellow card on 62 minutes and Manchester City took the afternoon apart in sixteen minutes flat. Liverpool 0, Manchester City 3, and a scoreline that said rather less about the mood in the stadium than the hour that preceded it.
This was City's first match since an independent commission found the club guilty of breaching Premier League financial regulations, a ruling that described arrangements with commercial partners as sham contracts used to disguise secret funding of more than £830m. City deny wrongdoing and have appealed. No sanction has been handed down yet, and the range of what might come, from record points deductions to relegation or expulsion, is wide enough that nobody around the club pretends to know what this season is actually worth.
Sixteen minutes that ended it
Gravenberch went for a foul on Jeremy Doku, who had been on the pitch six minutes after replacing Iliman Ndiaye. Three minutes later Erling Haaland drilled in the opener. Three minutes after that Doku himself found the top corner from Elliot Anderson's pass, and on 78 minutes Rayan Cherki finished off a move City had built through 41 consecutive passes, Josko Gvardiol supplying the final one. Gvardiol, Anderson, Doku: three names that had barely featured in the first half's story.
Before all that, the game had been strangely flat. City slowed everything down to take the heat out of the ground, Liverpool pressed without finding a way through, and the clearest openings came after the restart, when Gianluigi Donnarumma denied Victor Munoz and Gravenberch in quick succession. Haaland rolled one wide when clean through and held his head in his hands. He did not miss the second chance.
What the Kop brought, and what City brought back
The pre-match atmosphere was exactly as advertised. Banners on the Kop carried the line "A Generation Of Supporters Cheated". The away end answered with a flag reading "In Khaldoon We Trust".
Chants of "cheat" followed City's players around for most of the ninety minutes.
Enzo Maresca was not interested in pretending the past fortnight had been easy. "Very proud of the players because I know how tough it has been for them in the last two or three weeks with the noise," he said. "We need to learn how to deal with the noise because the noise will be with us at all of our away games. Our noise is to win games." Doku, asked about the off-field business, gave the only answer a player can give in that situation: "I'm just here to talk about the game."
Gary Neville, working the match for Sky Sports, was blunter about where this leaves everyone. He praised Ruben Dias, Donnarumma and Anderson, then added that if the guilty verdicts are confirmed "there's going to be a cloud over the club". Micah Richards thought both bookings were soft and that Doku changed the game. Stephen Warnock, on BBC Radio 5 Live, called it a comprehensive and deserved win.
Liverpool have a sharper problem
Virgil van Dijk declined to comment on the verdict while the process continues, and was more useful on the football. "First half was good from us. We showed our intensity," he said. "Second half the red card changed the game, especially when you concede quickly afterwards." That is fair as far as it goes, though Andoni Iraola's side had already gone an hour at home without creating much against a team that had spent most of it managing the tempo rather than attacking.
City now sit three points clear at the top with six straight league wins. Both clubs are back out on Wednesday, Liverpool away at LASK in the Champions League and City at home to Paris St-Germain, before Liverpool travel to Brentford and City host Ipswich Town at the weekend.
Match facts: Liverpool 0-3 Manchester City, Anfield, Sunday 11 October. Goals: Haaland 65, Doku 68 (Anderson), Cherki 78 (Gvardiol). Red card: Gravenberch 62 (second yellow). Doku on 56 for Ndiaye. City's sixth consecutive league win leaves them three points clear at the top.
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