by There will be smoke, noise and a real sense of humor. People will shout at a bus. The TV graphics will go sideways and flash. In good time a thin-legged man will do a high-speed tactical mime on the touchline, rotating both arms and yawning at invisible levers, as if reversing an imaginary submarine.
There will definitely be goals too. Liverpool and Manchester City have scored 50 goals between them in their last 14 games before their bravura meeting at Anfield on Sunday evening. But this feels like a game that could just be marked by misses too, by shanks, muffs, scuffs, crossbar-wobbling hoicks. Chances will be taken. And in the meantime, chances – Big Chances – will also be lost.
There is always a temptation to do the soft fast before a game as exciting as this meeting of the Premier League’s best. We know the iconography of these occasions, the talk of duels, one on one, title moments to capture.
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The reality is often different. Experience suggests there are no one-shot deciders, not with 10 games to play, with Arsenal very much in the mix, and a fixture list that could suggest the three-way title race is still decided by who as well as you can do against Spurs. .
And yet this feels like a real tie-breaker, given the recent history of doomsday hunting. It also feels like an unusually open prospect, two teams whose blueprint of attack is configured around extremely visible, completely opposite, but in some ways oddly aligned.
Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez have been a fun comparison since they arrived in England a few days apart for similar fees, an unusually athletic and agile 6ft center forward. They were fascinating for other reasons too, key players whose strengths, as a matter of form and style, are inevitably linked to their moments of weakness.
On the one hand, Haaland, the pure phenomenon scoring goals, razor edge in a team that won three times, who also seems, in isolated moments, to be playing with a series of propellers strapped to his feet. On the other side is the Premier League’s own lord of anarchy, a footballer who doesn’t so much contribute to a game of football as disrupt it, circling the center of Jürgen Klopp’s attack as he grows ever more determined.
Both are having excellent seasons. Haaland as a point of tactical evolution for the great midfield fetishist Pep Guardiola; Núñez as a small return, a change closer to the concussive, creative gegenpressing of early Klopp.
Along with the high-profile miss, the uber-shank has been a notable feature of both teams’ seasons. It is nothing new for Liverpool and City to be at the summit of the Premier League Big Chances Missed table (Liverpool top on 52; City two goals). This is partly a numbers game. The best teams make more chances. So they score more and lose more too. It’s just a chance to lose to good players, either destroy your hopes and dreams and reject them like a shark being cowed or understood as an act of human weakness.
But there are two interesting sub-points here. Firstly, the obvious main role of the two centre-forwards in those Missed Chances. Haaland tops the individual table with 26. Núñez is second, also on about 50% of his team’s total, with both on track to surpass last season’s goal tally.
Again it’s not hard to see why. City’s entire game is now based on finding ways to create openings for their designated finisher. This is a team that has constant possession in the attacking third. Haaland will miss some of the chances that will naturally become his feature of the day, especially when the cinematic miss gives a clear note of variety in an otherwise clean and often dominant game. As with last week’s semi-defeat at the Etihad, Haaland appears out of the skies like a striking aircraft to hit the ball not just a little but a mile over the bar.
A significant part of Haaland’s particular losing style – the power miss, all the tangled legs and pirouetting violence – is how these moments relate to his super strengths. Haaland’s great attribute is that unmatched combination of size, pace and precision. Usain Bolt was unique in that he possessed the length of a big man, and the speed and speed of an ordinary sprinter. Haaland has the same combination of immense qualities and human-scale application. Close-quarter electricity, matched with the ability to turn and run from 30 yards, the point from which he is essentially unstoppable: this has become irresistible over time.
It is also the reason why he misses chances that way, because the way City play more often asks him to use the most complex tools, those quick chances close to the goal. And because when that part of his game is off he will miss with Elan, he will remind us that the big man is needed to work in small spaces. So instead of clipping poles we get great bumps into the ground, or we get headers over the bar when it looks like it’s trying to squeeze its body into the back seat of a saloon through a door.
Haaland doesn’t worry about losses, Haaland doesn’t owe it to himself to apply the same energy to every touch because he knows that he will succeed in the end that way. A concern for City are those periods when he will completely disappear from the game, as has sometimes happened against better teams with better one-on-one defenders. With Haaland as their focus City are deadlier and more vulnerable, more vulnerable to the counter-attack. He may not be a player with great range or deeper gears, but his presence still defines this team from back to front.
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Over the last few months Núñez has made just as much of an impact at Liverpool, albeit in a very different template. Even his misses are different. Núñez’s specialty is in the snatch or the slant, the miss when he seems to be in complete control of his body, but still able to shoot strangely wide, to break the post with power and pointless accuracy.
Again those shortcomings are the other side of his main strength, which is to create a constant, hypermobile disorder. Núñez is not equipped to match Haaland’s goals. But he has 21 tackles and interceptions this season, 592 touches, 36 receptions, 2,149 meters of ball transport, figures significantly high in his position.
These numbers represent the reality of the creative presence that the ancient Greeks would call a “bustle”, a revolving series of collisions, angles, shot runs, squash runs. Núñez is always moving, always in contact with the nearest hostile body, rarely lurking in space waiting for his sniper shot. And as in the case of Haaland, what they miss is a natural part of the qualities he gives them. For all the narrow spells the last time Liverpool lost with Núñez in the starting XI was Real Madrid in March last year.
Both managers, mainly Guardiola, have always wanted to dominate, they have won series by keeping the ball and reducing the variables in a game. Neither feels right now, ahead of a game that will be decided as ever by moments taken and moments lost.
