Liverpool vs  ManCity : Reawakening 13 years modern rivalry at Anfield on Sunday

Thirteen years after the Sheikh Mansour takeover, Manchester City stormed the last bastion of Premier League resistance by winning at Anfield last season

The 4-1 win at Anfield last season – that laid to rest the hoodoo City have suffered since the 2008 takeover – made it two wins and a draw in the last three meetings, including the 4-0 stuffing they handed out after Jurgen Klopp’s team had been declared champions in 2020.

And the Blues have not had that kind of success against the “other” Reds since the Thirties, when they racked up four successive victories over two seasons – winning 2-0 at Anfield and 6-0 at Maine Road in 1935-36, and then repeating the torture with a 5-0 victory at Anfield and 5-1 home win the following year as they won the Football League title and Liverpool very nearly got relegated alongside Manchester United.

City will head down the M62 on Sunday to resume this most modern of rivalries with the two teams currently occupying the two top spots in the Premier League.

City had enjoyed an unspoken bond with Liverpool for most of the intervening years, forged by a mutual loathing of the aristocrats from Old Trafford, and fuelled by the fact that since the glory days of the 1960s, City had presented little or no threat to the Merseyside giants as they dominate English football for the best part of two decades.

But Sheikh Mansour’s intervention in 2008 changed all that.

Suddenly City were no longer the acceptable face of Manchester, a pretty much nailed-on three points – they were upstart nouveau riche who presented a real threat to Liverpool’s designs on scrambling back onto their Premier League perch.

The Blues, backed by heavy investment, began knocking over all the big guns – United and Tottenham were both despatched 6-1 on their own turf as title successes started to roll in, and Arsenal and Chelsea were treated with similar disdainful respect.

But for 13 years after the City takeover, Liverpool resisted, and last season’s brilliant Blues win was their first at Anfield since Nicolas Anelka has returned to haunt his old club in 2003.

These matches have taken on huge significance, despite Liverpool’s insistence that City are an irrelevance to them, and that the real rivalry is with United, without a title win in eight years.

Last season was a write-off for Liverpool, badly hit by the loss of Virgil Van Dijk and Joe Gomez to injury, and the season before, interrupted by the pandemic, was a Scouse cakewalk as City struggled with their own injury troubles.

But the last time City and Liverpool truly went head to head, in 2018-19, Liverpool lost one game all season – to City, an epic 2-1 Etihad Stadium triumph capped by Leroy Sane’s nerveless winner – and still came up a point short.

That was a season that defied the old adage about a league season being a marathon rather than a sprint. City and Liverpool both shot out of the blocks and kept up a breathless pace for the whole 26 miles.

The Blues won it by a point on a dramatic final day of the season, and third-placed Chelsea were a staggering 25 points behind Liverpool.

Few expect that kind of breakaway from City and Liverpool this season, with Chelsea and United both threatening to make it an intriguing four-way battle.

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Even in the Sheikh Mansour era, there had been slim pickings for the Blues until last season, with two draws and two defeats in their previous four title-winning campaigns.

The goalless draw in 2018-19 was a serious missed opportunity, as Riyad Mahrez skied his penalty kick late in the game after the ploy of playing Bernardo Silva in a deeper role had stymied Klopp’s high-tempo, heavy metal headbangers.

Interestingly, Bernardo did a similar job last weekend, as City did a job on Chelsea, and a reprise on Sunday afternoon would not be a big surprise.

City’s first title season under Pep Guardiola in 2017-18 was also haunted by the Liverpool spectre – only a late rally to make it 4-3 prevented an embarrassing scoreline after the Blues had been blown away, and that was a prelude to the traumatic two-legged defeat in the Champions League three months later.

That night saw a further souring of relations between the clubs and the two sets of fans after City’s bus came under fire from a hail of missiles on its way to the ground.

The league meeting at Anfield was one of only two reverses City suffered that season as they racked up a record 100 points. Even when the ointment is at its most rich and sweet-smelling, Liverpool have a knack of dropping a fly in it.

That Liverpool win proved academic as City still stormed away with the league, but Liverpool’s 3-2 win in 2014 turned out to be one of the sweetest defeats in City’s history.

Liverpool fans were openly celebrating the end of their long wait for a league title.

The three points that day left Liverpool needing four wins from their last six games to take their first crown for 24 years, but Steven Gerrard’s slip against Chelsea and a stunning Crystal Palace comeback, plus City’s surge to six wins from six, thwarted them at the last.

But City still had that final hoodoo to break.

Six years into their revolution, City had won at every Premier League stadium apart from, bizarre as it may seem now, Sunderland, Stoke and Liverpool, where they repeatedly tripped up.

Those jinxes were laid to rest one by one, with Sunderland despatched 4-1 in 2014, Stoke by the same scoreline in 2015, and finally Liverpool, curiously also by 4-1, last season.

Liverpool can point to two calamitous errors by goalkeeper Alisson as the Blues piled on the misery last season, but there was little doubt that City were much the better side, with Phil Foden in mercurial mood, capping it off with a stunning fourth goal.

City also contrived to miss another Anfield penalty, this time Ilkay Gundogan the culprit, when the game was still in the balance.

Liverpool can rightly point out that this time the match-up is more even, with Van Dijk back at the heart of their defence.

There is also a claim that it was less than coincidence that City’s only win at Anfield in the last 18 years came when supporters were banned by Covid restrictions.

That is a theory that can never be tested, and the only way for City to answer it would be to repeat the dose, in front of the Liverpool faithful.