Manchester City beat Liverpool as guilty verdict and TV coverage dominate debate
Manchester City defeated Liverpool in Sunday’s Premier League fixture that passed largely without incident despite a charged atmosphere, and Liverpool were reduced to 10 men before City secured victory amid criticism that players and staff appeared to milk the result.
The game was billed as one of the most hyped Premier League matches of all time and, by Football Daily’s reckoning, rated about 8.5 on its feist-o-meter; the visiting fans met the players with pantomime booing, banners accusing the club of serial cheating and some in the away end performing the Poznan, while a first half described as forgettable gave way to a later City celebration that included doing handstands.
Broadcast coverage became a focal point after the match, with Sky assembling Jamie Carragher, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Micah Richards and Daniel Sturridge for extended punditry and Joe Cole appearing on TNT Sports; the coverage was criticised in the piece for condemning City without making the wider commercial implications explicit. Neville said: “If you could take me off Manchester City games moving forward for the next few months until the verdicts have been heard, I would be absolutely delighted,” and added: “At the end of the game it is quite hard because you are imagining, basically, if these guilty verdicts are confirmed, there is going to be a huge cloud hanging over the whole league.”
Football Daily noted the legal position in blunt terms: “Obviously, the irritating pedant in Football Daily behoves us to clarify that the guilty verdict has already been confirmed, but is now simply subject to appeal.” The piece described the current situation around City as a “multibillion-pound mirage” in which matches, goals and trophy moments can feel provisional until the legal process is fully resolved.
The article also addressed squad composition, saying the vast majority of City’s current players are not tainted by direct association with the financial chicanery perpetrated by their club’s owners until it came to a conveniently abrupt halt on the final day of the 2017-18 season, while adding that the presence at the club of many stars responsible for embarrassing Liverpool is not entirely unrelated to the skulduggery which preceded their arrival.
The email edition included a series of other items: Forest Green Rovers owner Dale Vince on operating without a manager after Robbie Savage “did one to Peterborough”, saying: “Nobody’s in the frame, nobody’s connected to the job, at the minute there’s no vacancy. At the moment, we’re going to try something new, we’re going to see how it goes and we’ll see where it goes … We like where we are, we’re going to see how it goes, maybe for a few games, maybe for a month. The coaching team have been doing the heavy lifting anyway.” Hartlepool ended a six-match losing run by heading down and winning 4-2 in the National League.
Readers’ contributions and columns were also cited: Pål Jørgen Bakke advised Xavi Simons to read What they Teach you at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton and What they Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, and Noble Francis wrote: “As José Mourinho has already, in the space of just two months, done his infamous ‘por qué’, printing out a piece of paper to ‘prove’ he’s right to the media and refusing to show up at the press conference after Vinícius Júnior rightly, and hilariously, had a great goal chalked off and was sent off in the same move for hair-pulling, it’s good to see that, like all great artists of the past, he’s just ended up as a bad tribute act to his former self, doing a farewell tour and churning out all the hits”. The email invited letters to the.boss@theguardian.com and named Pål Jørgen Bakke as the “prizeless letter o’ the day”.
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