Champions League: An English clash of colours when Liverpool vs. Manchester City

Well, well, well. Who would have thought it? The Champions League quarter-final draw pitches the blue half of Manchester against the red half of Liverpool, while Jose Mourinho remains green with envy.

Let’s face it, the draw was inevitable really. Anyway, for the neutrals among us it’s a mouth-watering Champions League tie. A team who can’t stop scoring goals against one that, until recently, couldn’t stop conceding them. Surely it’s a done deal? We’ll see.

Guardiola is now the ‘Special One’ if he wasn’t already. His team won the league about six months ago, and apart from the little slip-up at Wigan, a four trophy salute was well on the cards. But it’s ironic don’t you agree that in the quarter-final of the Champions League, his champions elect will be pitched against the only team who have beaten them in the league thus far this season.

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Granted, by the end of that game Liverpool were clinging to the three points like white on rice and almost threw away two of them, but they held on and stopped all that nonsensical stuff about City going through the entire season unbeaten. Thank God for that because I don’t think many of us could have survived the weight of the platitudes.

But make no mistake this will be a far bigger challenge for Jurgen Klopp than it will be for Guardiola. Many have pointed out Klopp’s gung-ho style will not reap the main prizes, and they point to his lack of a plan B when games are getting away from his team.

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Are Man City favourites for this Champions League clash

Others have opined that his team isn’t much better than the one left by Brendan Rodgers. There may be some truth in this not least because his philosophy of all-out attack, attack, attack has largely ignored what’s going on at the other end of the pitch where his defence has been shown to have more holes that a block of Gorgonzola.

He has since gone some way to remedy this with the purchase of Virgil Van Dijk, though I must admit when I watched him in his first couple of games I thought they had purchased his more famous brother, Dick!

But to give Klopp his due the defence has improved, though it’s far from the finished article. However it is his failure to adequately address the goal keeping situation which may come back to haunt him over two legs with one of Europe’s most free scoring teams.

But for all this the Liverpool faithful remain convinced he is the right man. Klopp is a trophy manager all right, but he is yet to stick one on the Anfield mantelpiece. Now we’ll see what he’s made of. He knows what’s coming and there should be no surprises unless of course over the two leagues we see a paucity of goals.

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My personal outlook on the Champions League clash

Personally I don’t see that happening. Already this season the two league meetings between the two have harvested twelve of them, a glut in anybody’s language. Liverpool’s problem is that Manchester City are consistently brilliant week in, week out, whereas Liverpool lurch from a stirring victory one week to abject defeat the next.

If Klopp’s team are to reach the semi-finals of the Champions League he’ll need one of the former in each leg. Anything less and it’s auf wiedersehen. We might not be able to predict an exact result, but we can certainly predict that it won’t be boring. My own view is that City’s midfield will be way too strong, and will provide far more bullets for their front men than their Liverpool counterparts. But of course, you just never know.

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The only thing that will surely beat City is complacency. It’s what did for Tottenham in the last round when Pochettino and his men considered the tie done and dusted with their two away goals in Turin, and believed their own hype about how good they were at Wembley.

And it was evident in City’s defeat to Wigan. Complacency is one of the biggest cancers in elite level sport, if not the biggest. Guardiola, you can be sure, won’t allow this intruder to creep into the dressing room again.

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