“The game was equal,” Pep Guardiola said when he was asked how he viewed the breathlessly anticipated meeting between Manchester City and Liverpool in the moments before Sadio Mane was sent off.
Those who felt an injustice had been done might have been comforted by Guardiola’s words. This may have been what they wanted to hear, especially those who felt the game hung in the balance when Mane was sent off.
Guardiola was speaking after a 5-0 victory so he could easily be gracious. But maybe he was right, even if City had done more with their equal share than Liverpool had at that point.
The Mane sending off fundamentally altered the balance of the match, but Liverpool might also be concerned at how fundamentally it was altered.
When Mane was sent off, most observers, whatever their opinion of the dismissal, felt the game was over. Liverpool’s players seemed to share this point of view. Perhaps they, too, were upset that the game was now finished as a spectacle and would not provide the viewing pleasure millions around the world had been anticipating.
Or else they may have been distracted by a sense of injustice when they lost Mane, although teams have to prepare for the possibility of a sending off no matter what the circumstances.
Other teams might have held on and kept the deficit at a goal until half-time and other teams might have made sure they didn’t end up losing 5-0. Other teams, however, might not play with the flair and inventiveness of a Klopp side so maybe that is an acceptable trade off.
“Sometimes it’s hard to play against ten men,” Pep Guardiola said, “but today we did it well”.
Liverpool didn’t play well with ten men, they seemed resigned to the inevitability of defeat and a midfield which had been so powerful against Arsenal, struggled to make an impact here.
Klopp said they have training drills with seven defending against fourteen, but the ten against eleven could not hold City out. City are always going to be hard to hold out.
Most people will overlook that because of the drama surrounding the Mane sending off, but there will be other days when things aren’t going in Liverpool’s favour and they will need to find a way of getting a result.
Klopp may have dismissed the result, but he also suggested that he understood this, especially when he talked about how things could have followed a different pattern in the first 30 minutes.
“You don’t lose 5-0 when a lot of things are right,” Klopp said after the game, but he also knew that by the time the sending off took place, Liverpool had already wasted great opportunities for the scoreline to be different.
“We should have been in the lead,” Klopp said and while this might offer some encouragement too, particularly the manner with which Mo Salah toyed with Nicolas Otamendi, there were worries as well, particularly the manner in which Mo Salah failed to make the most of his toying with Nicolas Otamendi.
This will be the area of the game Klopp will focus on and feel could have been better. The moments when Salah was free and players weren’t making runs to the near post concerned him and would have been rectified at half-time, he said. But by the time half-time came, everything had changed.
“Nothing went right for us today,” he said and he wasn’t simply focusing on the sending off. Liverpool were playing at 60 per cent, Klopp said, which may have been inevitable after the international break, but which contributed to their failure to make the most of their opportunities.
Klopp said he was still positive when Mane was sent off but the minutes before half-time were critical.
If the game had progressed with eleven against eleven that fault line might have been exposed productively, but as it was Liverpool were in a position by the interval from which they couldn’t recover.
By the end of the first half, Liverpool were two goals down and a man down, a position Klopp was undoubtedly correct in describing as “not cool”. Their chance had gone.
“We needed to influence the game in another direction, we need to score here,” the Liverpool manager said about the first half.
“If City take too much confidence, they make a mistake. If we lose too much confidence, it’s a mistake.”
There wasn’t much point in appealing Mane’s sending off, it would be a “waste of time”, Klopp said, adding “like the whole game today”.
But he’ll know that isn’t true, that there will come a time in the season when he needs to remind his players of what they did and didn’t do here on Saturday.
“This was a hard lesson today,” Klopp said but he won’t let his players think there was nothing to be learned from it.
