With players now quicker and stronger, the champions can further expose Pep Guardiola’s misfiring side, whose ability to stop the opposition passing is waningSunday’s meeting of Manchester City and Liverpool is not just between the past two Premier League champions and the two favourites to win the title this season or even Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, it is also a meeting of two different modes of pressing.The tactical centre of European football is shifting. While the four German sides lead or are level on points at the top of their Champions League groups, Spanish clubs are struggling. It is true Barcelona and Real Madrid have specific issues of politics and recruitment, but there is also something more fundamental that...
If City’s players are not bored of Guardiola, Sunday’s fascinating test against Liverpool would be a good point to show itWhen the history of this season comes to be written the meeting of Liverpool and Manchester City on Sunday might not be seen as decisive in the title race, as these two sides’ encounters have been in the recent past, but with the situations they find themselves in the match looks absolutely fascinating. There is pressure on both sides this season, City wanting to knock Liverpool off their perch and the champions desperate to raise the trophy again, hopefully with fans there to see it this time, and perhaps this weekend we will see who is coping with it the...
Liverpool are not so much sloppy as playing the popular high-risk game that late-period Alex Ferguson eschewedFootball has changed. Most disagreements between managers and pundits are tedious affairs, rooted in complex and broadly impenetrable codes of respect and of concern only to professional axe-grinders. But the slightly spiky exchange between Roy Keane and Jürgen Klopp after Liverpool’s 3-1 victory over Arsenal on Monday was fascinating, less for the soap opera element of a bullish Klopp interrogating an awkwardly smirking Keane, or for Keane’s dry “touchy … imagine if they’d lost” rejoinder, but for what it revealed about how the two men view the game, and what that says about its evolution.️ "Did Mr Keane say it was a sloppy performance?...
Jürgen Klopp has bought the Spaniard to ward off entropy and bring variety after running and pressing teams to deathAll great sides are haunted by entropy. Even in their most transcendent moments, it is there in the shadows, hissing its insistent question: “What next?”When Liverpool won the Champions League in Madrid the answer was clear: there was another peak still to be scaled, and they did it last season by winning their first league title in 30 years. But after two years in which they achieved the second- and fourth-highest ever points totals, how can they maintain that level? How can they avoid the trajectory of Manchester City who, after a pair of similarly brilliant seasons, suffered an 18-point drop-off?...
Backed by a clutch of costly summer arrivals, the bristling Chelsea manager must back his jibes with results “Only title you’ve won and you’re giving it the big ’un.”There were some fascinating shades to the touchline stramash between Frank Lampard and Jürgen Klopp in the dog days of the Premier League’s summer season. Related: Frank Lampard tells Callum Hudson-Odoi to work harder for Chelsea place Uncle Harry Redknapp told a televised fans forum that Frank would go 'right to the very top' as a player Related: Chelsea's swanky rebuild is in need of more solid foundations | Jacob Steinberg Continue reading...