Caution reigns as title contenders negotiate slippery slope to glory
THERE’S a Japanese game show called Slippery Stairs, which like all the best Japanese game shows, is a winning blend of the sadistic, the surreal and the slapstick.
The entire premise can be summarised thus: six Lycra-clad contestants all attempt to ascend – as you may have guessed – a set of extremely slippery steps, which have been lubricated with some nefarious emulsion of ice, baby oil and whatever it is they use to polish the floors at John Lewis.
Naturally, this proves an onerous challenge. Some contestants barely get past the first step before tumbling over. Some contestants go flying in a spectacular whirl of limbs, taking out two or three of their fellow competitors with them.
Some make it, in painstaking increments, all the way to the top, only to make one final exhausted grab for the giant cheque, lose their footing and slide all the way back down to the bottom.
The reason for bringing up Slippery Stairs here, in a piece on Liverpool v Manchester City – a game which, you may already have gathered, was not all that exciting in its own right – is that it shares one or two salient characteristics with elite-level football.
Namely, that what is often the most effective strategy – to minimise risk, to play the long game, to take the climb one slow, laborious step at a time – is also by far the least entertaining. When every move invites potential catastrophe, the upshot is frequently a grim scramble of pure endurance.
And thus it was here, over an hour and a half of Premier League football that straddled the oleaginous membrane between tension and tedium. Riyad Mahrez’s late penalty miss was, in many ways, the twist that wasn’t: the weary body feint that hinted tantalisingly at a change of direction without ever really threatening to deliver it.
As Mahrez’s penalty soared in the general direction of Formby, felt like the perfect emblem for a game that boasted plenty of coiled energy, but precious little fire: a safety-first punt to touch that kept both team’s unbeaten record immaculately intact.
In many ways, you could tell it was a title decider, despite the general protestations from both managers: a game that neither side could really afford to lose, and neither side really had to win, and which therefore settled into an arrestingly soporific holding pattern. Both teams seemed too wary of the other, too haunted by the threat of disaster, too alert to the possibility of sliding all the way back down the stairs.
City, you feel, will be the happier of the two sides, despite that golden late opportunity to claim all three points. Not only did they safely negotiate what was on paper their toughest challenge of the Premier League season, but to a large extent they carried out their gameplan to the letter.
Mahrez’s penalty would have capped perhaps the perfect away performance, even if, strictly speaking, City’s weight of chances didn’t quite justify the win.
But for Pep Guardiola, a cautiously successful afternoon, with the emphasis on caution. City’s manager was determined that they would not be caught on the break as they were so thrillingly here last season. Then, Liverpool’s front three poured into the empty spaces behind City’s advancing full-backs, dragging the centre-halves into unfamiliar areas, rattling the City piggy bank until finally it yielded coins.
Containment
Now, Benjamin Mendy and Kyle Walker were more circumspect, only rarely advancing into the final third. Mendy wasn’t at his best, but then nor was Mo Salah up against him. Walker made one surging run with the ball into the Liverpool half late into the second half, but by and large his role was again one of containment. Bernardo Silva sat a little deeper than usual, offering the defence another passing outlet, often dropping past Fernandinho to pick it up before parcelling it safely away.
Without the ball, City pressed with controlled intent, closing down Liverpool’s passing lanes, challenging Virgil van Dijk to nail the long ball over the top. They were aided by the early injury to James Milner, whose clever movement can often draw defenders into areas they don’t really want to go. Naby Keita was competent, but City found him easier to defend against.
And really, that was the story of the game: one of extreme competence, unless you account for penalty-taking technique. Once the howls of fury and shrieks of injustice had subsided, all that remained was a fairly humdrum 0-0 that really told us little about either side we didn’t already know. There were no grievous errors, no tactical blunders, no 3/10 performances and no real 8/10 performances either (although the excellent John Stones might have had a decent case).
Which, in a way, is exactly as it should be. It is, after all, only the start of October. As Liverpool and City negotiate the slippery steps to title glory, both seemed acutely aware that there’s plenty of grease lying in their way between now and the end of the season.