Manchester City maintained their 100% start to the Premier League season by winning at Anfield, on an afternoon when the occasion was shaped from before kick-off by sustained hostility from the Liverpool support over the club’s financial rules case. Erling Haaland, Jérémy Doku and Rayan Cherki scored the goals, and Liverpool’s resistance collapsed once Ryan Gravenberch was sent off, sending Andoni Iraola to a first defeat since taking charge.
The chanting started around Anfield before kick-off and returned at regular intervals. The Kop wanted to tell City what they are and where they are going: according to the home supporters, they are cheats who are set to be relegated. It was less a bear-pit of an atmosphere than an outpouring, but it was impossible to ignore. The most eye-catching banner, unfurled before the game, carried the word “cheats” alongside a very long sequence of pound signs, while other banners riffed on Oasis lyrics, among them the line “after all, you really robbed us all.”
City’s travelling supporters came armed with scores of inflatable bananas, some of them in old-school match shirts, and banners in support of the club chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak. The visitors also took their team buses around the back of the stadium on the way in, avoiding the jibes from the streets, but that only postponed the inevitable.
The backdrop was the guilty verdicts handed to City by an independent commission on virtually all of the 100-plus charges they have faced for breaking the Premier League’s financial rules. City continue to maintain their innocence and have appealed. When the Premier League published the document containing the first raft of details of the decision on the Tuesday before last, it hit hard: the weight of the language, which dripped with contempt, as well as the sheer extent of the transgressions, including proven misconduct, sham arrangements, concerted attempts to frustrate the investigation, and witnesses giving evidence they knew to be untrue. That served to frame this game, and will continue to frame each one City play for the foreseeable future.
There was very little to report in terms of first-half action. Even the melee that broke out in the 12th minute, after Alexis Mac Allister tussled with Elliot Anderson, was the definition of handbags. There were no big chances and the precision on the final ball was frequently absent. Liverpool had lost three of their best players of the season so far to injuries sustained during the international break — Dominik Szoboszlai, Cody Gakpo and Alexander Isak — which plainly did not help their rhythm.
Iraola gave Lewis Koumas a full league debut up front, and it was the 21-year-old who had the first decent effort of the game straight after the restart, Gianluigi Donnarumma standing tall to save. Liverpool upped the intensity and had a spell in which the Kop sensed the breakthrough was coming: Gravenberch worked Donnarumma and Mac Allister volleyed wide. Haaland then blew a glorious chance on the hour, dinking past the far post, and City had otherwise created little.
Then everything changed. Gravenberch had caught the eye with his surging runs, but he was on the wrong side when he challenged Doku, who was ready to spark a counterattack. It was clumsy, and the contact was not exactly strong, but having been booked at the start of the second half for a foul on Anderson, Gravenberch was running an almighty risk. He was shown a second yellow in the 62nd minute and did not get away with it.
City poured through the opening. Haaland swept them in front from a deflected Doku cross, and Doku — on as a gamechanging substitute in the 56th minute — curled them further ahead with an absolute beauty. The best was still to come, and again Doku was involved, almost teeing up Nico O’Reilly before the third arrived. Cherki dummied a pass from Anderson, ran on to a back-heel from another substitute, Josko Gvardiol, cut away from Liverpool substitute Jeremie Frimpong and shot home. It was a team goal marked by individual brilliance, and it left Liverpool broken. All City’s players could do about the noise around them was blot it out, and they did so, running all over Liverpool’s ten men. A new reality off the pitch, perhaps, but the same old City on it.