Liverpool beat Man City in the Champions League with three first-half goals
By Rory Smith
They started arriving in the late afternoon, three hours before kickoff. They filled every spare inch of space they could find. When there was no room left on the ground, they clambered up traffic signal poles and scurried onto walls.
Where Arkles Road turns into Anfield Road and Liverpool’s stadium suddenly looms up into the sky, they unfurled their banners and draped their flags, and they sang their songs. Then, a little more than an hour before the opening whistle, their moment came. First, Manchester City’s team bus turned the corner and began its slow, nervous progression toward Anfield, guarded by mounted police. Thick red smoke clogged the air.
Firecrackers exploded. Pyrotechnics sputtered into life, their sodium light cutting through the fog. Bottles and beer cans flew, a handful clattering off the sides of the bus. And from the top of the traffic signals and the walls came a wave of sound, a war cry. Then the bus, and the players it contained, disappeared into the peace of the stadium. The job was done. The flags came down and the flares sputtered out. Ever since Liverpool was drawn against Manchester City for the quarterfinals of the Champions League, those few minutes, long before the start of the game, had been the focus of intense debate, a convenient shorthand for what seemed to be the great unknown in the two-game tie. City is clearly technically superior to Liverpool. Its position atop the Premier League, where it may be crowned champion as soon as this weekend, is conclusive proof of that. But Pep Guardiola’s City squad is not yet as emotionally wedded to the Champions League as Liverpool’s is. It doesn’t have the weight of history in European soccer behind it. It has not yet accrued immunity to the sort of atmosphere, the high-stakes hostility, that this competition can generate, in certain places at least. How it coped under the lights and in the bear pit of Anfield, the theory ran, would decide how the tie would go, and the test would start on the corner of Arkles and Anfield Road. Not that City was especially happy about that. The club expressed concern to the local constabulary about the risk of disobedience. But rather than cancel the “welcome,” the police decided to reroute it, in the hope of controlling it.
It didn’t work. Those projectiles did enough damage to the bus that City had to call for a replacement. The original, Guardiola said, was “destroyed” and in no condition to make the journey of about an hour back to Manchester. Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, immediately apologized for the behavior of a handful of his team’s fans, and the club released a condemnatory statement, too. The police said they would comb through video footage to identify the perpetrators.
Correlation is not causation, but it would be foolish to separate the atmosphere of Wednesday night from the outcome. Manchester City, the best team in England and perhaps in Europe, crumbled, losing by 3-0, swept aside by Liverpool in a breathtaking first half and then resisted in a tense, anxious second.
Guardiola scotched the idea that his team might have been affected by the atmosphere — it was “good to live a Champions League game” at Anfield, he said — but it certainly looked a little like that. Strange things happen at this stadium in this competition. Thomas Tuchel said as much after Borussia Dortmund lost here in the Europa League two years ago. “It was as though the crowd knew what was going to happen,” he said.
City did all it could to stifle the noise, forcing Liverpool to play toward the Kop in the first half, rather than the second, and then spending the first few minutes in calm possession of the ball, hoping to quiet the crowd. None of it worked. Anfield crackled all night. It roared Liverpool on as it attacked, again and again, in the “15- or 20-minute spell” that Guardiola later said cost his team the game, and it lifted the team up as it rocked back on its heels in the second half, desperately keeping City at bay.
That, surely, is why fans go to games and sing, and shout, and sometimes scream: in the belief that it has some intangible effect on their team, and the opposition. And that it worked — or appeared to work, for now — is, in a way, heartening. Soccer is indeed more scientific now, more coolly professional, more dismissive of the intangible. Anfield, on one night only, offered a reminder that, sometimes, the chaos takes over, that everything is up for grabs, and that the obvious and the logical does not have to happen. That is why they gathered, hours before kickoff, where Arkles Road meets Anfield Road: to do all they could.
They started arriving in the late afternoon, three hours before kickoff. They filled every spare inch of space they could find. When there was no room left on the ground, they clambered up traffic signal poles and scurried onto walls.
Where Arkles Road turns into Anfield Road and Liverpool’s stadium suddenly looms up into the sky, they unfurled their banners and draped their flags, and they sang their songs. Then, a little more than an hour before the opening whistle, their moment came. First, Manchester City’s team bus turned the corner and began its slow, nervous progression toward Anfield, guarded by mounted police. Thick red smoke clogged the air.
Firecrackers exploded. Pyrotechnics sputtered into life, their sodium light cutting through the fog. Bottles and beer cans flew, a handful clattering off the sides of the bus. And from the top of the traffic signals and the walls came a wave of sound, a war cry. Then the bus, and the players it contained, disappeared into the peace of the stadium. The job was done. The flags came down and the flares sputtered out. Ever since Liverpool was drawn against Manchester City for the quarterfinals of the Champions League, those few minutes, long before the start of the game, had been the focus of intense debate, a convenient shorthand for what seemed to be the great unknown in the two-game tie. City is clearly technically superior to Liverpool. Its position atop the Premier League, where it may be crowned champion as soon as this weekend, is conclusive proof of that. But Pep Guardiola’s City squad is not yet as emotionally wedded to the Champions League as Liverpool’s is. It doesn’t have the weight of history in European soccer behind it. It has not yet accrued immunity to the sort of atmosphere, the high-stakes hostility, that this competition can generate, in certain places at least. How it coped under the lights and in the bear pit of Anfield, the theory ran, would decide how the tie would go, and the test would start on the corner of Arkles and Anfield Road. Not that City was especially happy about that. The club expressed concern to the local constabulary about the risk of disobedience. But rather than cancel the “welcome,” the police decided to reroute it, in the hope of controlling it.
It didn’t work. Those projectiles did enough damage to the bus that City had to call for a replacement. The original, Guardiola said, was “destroyed” and in no condition to make the journey of about an hour back to Manchester. Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s manager, immediately apologized for the behavior of a handful of his team’s fans, and the club released a condemnatory statement, too. The police said they would comb through video footage to identify the perpetrators.
Correlation is not causation, but it would be foolish to separate the atmosphere of Wednesday night from the outcome. Manchester City, the best team in England and perhaps in Europe, crumbled, losing by 3-0, swept aside by Liverpool in a breathtaking first half and then resisted in a tense, anxious second.
Guardiola scotched the idea that his team might have been affected by the atmosphere — it was “good to live a Champions League game” at Anfield, he said — but it certainly looked a little like that. Strange things happen at this stadium in this competition. Thomas Tuchel said as much after Borussia Dortmund lost here in the Europa League two years ago. “It was as though the crowd knew what was going to happen,” he said.
City did all it could to stifle the noise, forcing Liverpool to play toward the Kop in the first half, rather than the second, and then spending the first few minutes in calm possession of the ball, hoping to quiet the crowd. None of it worked. Anfield crackled all night. It roared Liverpool on as it attacked, again and again, in the “15- or 20-minute spell” that Guardiola later said cost his team the game, and it lifted the team up as it rocked back on its heels in the second half, desperately keeping City at bay.
That, surely, is why fans go to games and sing, and shout, and sometimes scream: in the belief that it has some intangible effect on their team, and the opposition. And that it worked — or appeared to work, for now — is, in a way, heartening. Soccer is indeed more scientific now, more coolly professional, more dismissive of the intangible. Anfield, on one night only, offered a reminder that, sometimes, the chaos takes over, that everything is up for grabs, and that the obvious and the logical does not have to happen. That is why they gathered, hours before kickoff, where Arkles Road meets Anfield Road: to do all they could.