When Manchester City were drawn against Liverpool in the Champions League, everyone was expecting a tight game.
After all, the last time these two sides had met at Anfield, the Reds had walked away with three points in the Premier League, winning 4-3.
What no one was prepared for was Jürgen Klopp’s side absolutely dismantling Pep Guardiola’s plans in the first-half as his players went in at half-time 3-0 up.
With no second half goals, Liverpool will go to the Etihad next week full of confidence yet also aware Manchester City have the ability to turn things around at home if they rest on their laurels too much.
Still, the Cityzens’ performance didn’t exactly go down well with the European media.
We’ll start with L’Equipe, whose villains of the night were Kyle Walker and Ilkay Gündogan (both receiving 3/10), with the latter described as ‘insufficient’ with his intensity in midfield.
Gabriel Jesus also gets both barrels, given a 4/10 and labelled as ‘transparent’ for his first-half performance.
Over on Liverpool’s side, man of the match goes to Trent Alexander-Arnold, receiving a 7/10 for his ability to demonstrate he wasn’t the weak link everyone expected him to be, ‘muzzling’ Leroy Sané for the duration of the game.
Travelling to Italy, Gazzetta saw Mohamed Salah as the best performer (7.5/10), while Jürgen Klopp got the best rating (8/10), described as the ‘anti-Guardiola’.
While not as harsh as L’Equipe, the Italian newspaper heavily criticise Pep Guardiola (4.5/10) for his team crumbling at such an important moment of the season, with Walker, Gündogan and Gabriel Jesus receiving the same grade.
Just for balance purposes, we also decided to go have a quick look at what the friendly Catalan press thought of Manchester City’s performance, but even they found it difficult to say nice things about what the Premier League leaders had to offer.
Gündogan is described as ‘irrelevant’, Gabriel Jesus was ‘absent’, Vincent Kompany ended up being ‘unrecognisable’ and Laporte, at left-back, ‘disorientated’.
Liverpool, unsurprisingly, get the nicer adjectives through a ‘stellar’ Salah, an ‘impeccable’ Virgil Van Dijk and an ‘outstanding’ Alexander-Arnold.
Will next week be a different story? We can’t wait to find out.
