Liverpool vs Manchester City: Pep Guardiola hates playing at Anfield but this time, things are different

A new generation of Manchester City supporters have been born, grown up, left school and may have even passed their driving test since Nicolas Anelka’s 90th-minute winner secured their last Anfield win in May 2003, a few weeks before Phil Foden turned three-years-old.

Before that, you have to go back to 1981 and a 3-1 victory for John Bond’s title-chasing City on Boxing Day.

That only served to spur Liverpool into a stunning charge during the second half of the season, winning 20 of their final 25 games, rising from the bottom-half of the table right to the very top on the way to Bob Paisley’s fifth league championship. City finished 10th.

Between an FA Cup fifth round replay in 1956 and the present day, those are City’s only two wins at Anfield in 52 visits.

Much is made of such head-to-head records even though they span decades, taking in dramatically different eras in the history of the two clubs involved, often with long gaps between meetings.

Read more: Have Pep Guardiola and Manchester City found the key to ‘pandemic football’?

But those records carry greater relevance over shorter, more concentrated periods including the same cast of characters. Anfield is not just City’s bête noire, but Pep Guardiola's too.

“The motto ‘This is Anfield’ is no marketing spin,” Guardiola told Ara, a Catalan daily newspaper, a couple of months after Liverpool’s extraordinary Champions League semi-final turnaround against Barcelona two years ago.

Anfield’s legend strays into cliché - it can feel like any ordinary ground on a very ordinary match day - but there is something unique about it on the right occasion. Guardiola knows that. He has felt it - losing more games there than that at any other ground in his career - and he spoke with genuine reverence.

“There’s something about it that you will find in no other stadium in the world,” he said. “They score a goal and over the next five minutes you feel that you'll receive another four. You feel small and the rival players seem to be all over.”

The translation of the interview from Catalan to English gives a lovely, Ferguson-esque quality to Guardiola’s best quote. “It’s a bugger of a ground.”

That respect - fear, even - of Anfield has proved enough in the past to turn this ideologue into a pragmatist. Guardiola rarely bends to strengths or weaknesses of a particular opponent. He makes a point of playing on his own terms. Not at Anfield, though.

As one of his trusted performance analysts Carles Planchart told Pol Ballus and Lu Martin in Pep’s City: The Making of a Superteam: “Whenever we play at Anfield they always cause us a lot of problems, even if they have little domination of the ball or the match.

“Obviously we have to try to adapt our own tactics to deal with it and make corrections to our game if necessary.”

It has been that way ever since the 4-3 defeat in January 2018. Liverpool’s victory that day - powered by three second-half goals in nine minutes - not only punctured the air of invincibility around City’s centurions-to-be but announced this as the defining rivalry of the Premier League’s present era.

Three months later, Amazon’s cameras captured Guardiola pacing around the away dressing room before a 3-1 win at Everton, more preoccupied by a Champions League quarter final on the other side of Stanley Park in a few days' time.

Planchart is present, telling him: “I notice when they don’t have space they suffer a lot… but we are a team that risks a lot.”

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At Anfield, City weren’t a team that risked a lot. Guardiola changed his winning formula, benching Raheem Sterling and playing Ilkay Gundogan as one of four midfielders in a diamond rather than the usual three.

The aim was to have a greater sense of control, which would help avoid conceding multiple goals in quick succession again. The result was an anaemic 3-0 defeat, with all three scored in the space of 19 minutes. Once those 19 minutes passed, the game, the tie and City’s hopes of winning the Champions League were effectively over.

Guardiola could have taken this as proof that he should stick to his principles but the following October, he compromised again.

This time, the lowest possession figure ever recorded by a Guardiola side in the Premier League up to that point and a noticeably more risk-averse approach earned City a goalless draw, as well as their first clean sheet at Anfield in 32 years and a useful point.

It would have earned more if Riyad Mahrez had converted a late penalty rather than blazing into the Anfield Road end’s upper tier but that was also the only chance which Guardiola’s reserved approach had created.

For last season’s 3-1 defeat at Anfield, the game got away from an injury-hit City quickly - not only because of Fabinho’s opening goal after six minutes, but also Trent Alexander-Arnold escaping punishment for a potential handball in his own box moments earlier.

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That decision exacerbated a pre-existing antipathy towards VAR in the City dressing room - after two contentious calls against Tottenham Hotspur earlier that season and in that year’s Champions League quarter-finals.

When Alexander-Arnold escaped punishment for another potential handball late in the second half, it led to the image which defines City’s recent Anfield torment better than any other: Guardiola holding up two fingers, manically and repeatedly screaming ‘twice’, first to fourth official Mike Dean then up and into the ether.

But this Sunday, there are three crucial differences to any of Guardiola’s previous visits.

Firstly, if City are somewhat cautious or conservative, that will only be because that is how they have played for much of this season already. If some of the old effervescent magic is missing, it has been replaced by true steel.

That trade-off has produced 13 consecutive wins in all competitions, a 20-game unbeaten run stretching back to mid-November and 16 clean sheets over the same period. City not only look like the best in the Premier League, but the best in Europe.

Secondly, and fortunately for Guardiola, this time Anfieldwill be like practically every other stadium in the world. It will be empty.

The surges of momentum that blew City away in the past will not be possible, or at least will not carry the same force. This time, Guardiola and his players will not be outnumbered and made to “feel small”, in his words. It will be 11 vs 11 rather than 11 vs 54,000.

And finally, if Burnley and Brighton can, why can’t City?

This is Anfield, but not quite as Pep knows it. Guardiola has very few hills left to conquer on the English football landscape. He may not get a better chance to take the greatest one that remains elusive.