Tactically Naive: Trying to outclass Liverpool is exhausting and pointless

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. This week, an all-Premier League special. Because the noisiest football is the best football.

On Sunday afternoon, Liverpool hosted Manchester City, and it was exhausting. Ninety minutes and change of sprinting, shouting, pointing, fouling, complaining, and VARing with just enough decent football tucked in there to make it all worthwhile. But still, it looked knackering. It showed that there are a lot of tough gigs in the Premier League.

For instance, it’s a tough gig being a fourth official. You’re standing there looking all important, thinking about technical areas and light-up boards and minutes added on. Maybe there’s a substitution coming. Maybe you’ll have some paperwork to do. And then there’s some loud shouting —

— something’s happened. A penalty? No, not a penalty. Quite the opposite —

— and all of a sudden Pep Guardiola is walking towards you. No, he’s stalking. No! He’s hopping. Hopping mad. And he’s gone, in the eyes, and he’s jabbering and pointing and holding up two fingers. Two fingers! Two! One was bad enough, but two!

And now thankfully he has stopped pointing at you — you are, after all, merely a fourth official — and is pointing up at the sky, waving two fingers at God, bellowing to the heavens that his side have had two — two! two fingers! two! — penalties denied them. Two!

Tough gig, too, being Claudio Bravo. There are goalkeepers who look bad — a spilled cross here, an ill-advised charge from the line there — and then there are those, like Bravo, who seem simply not to exist at important moments.

Tactically Naive’s working theory: he’s a distant relative of Thing from the Addams Family, but instead of a hand he’s two feet. Brilliant feet. Some of the best feet around. Put them in boots, watch them pass out from the back. Just gorgeous stuff.

The rest of him, however, is a projection, a clever trick of light. There to provide the suggestion of the goalkeeper but, sadly, none of the rather important solidity.

Anyway, it’s an unanswerable question whether Ederson would have saved any of the goals. TN suspects he’d have been much better under the cross on the third goal, much more distracting on the second, and that nobody, however solid, was getting close to Fabinho’s first. You can understand why Guardiola might have been feeling ill-disposed towards God even before the penalty calls. An awkward time to lose your only fully-real goalkeeper.

Another tough gig: being God. However hard you work, however much you give him, Guardiola’s never happy.

You know, being a Sky Sports Hype Person is a pretty tough gig. It’s November, and there’s an eight-point gap at the top of the Premier League. Worse, the team that should be one half of the two-horse race is another whole point back, in fourth place, and has just been tonked 3-1 by the team at the top.

Perhaps “tonked” is a little harsh. City were arguably the better team between both boxes, for all that’s worth. It’s just that Liverpool get themselves from one box to the other at inhuman speed, and are pretty good at scoring once that’s done.

Twice — Twice! Two times! — in the first 20 minutes. Which rather killed the game as a contest and also, in another blow to our Sky Sports Hype Person, as a crucible. For neutrals, there was a reasonable expectation that somebody, at some point, would pick up a stupid red card, and that this stupid red card would come with a lot of pushing and shoving and holdmebackholdmebacking.

But even Fernandinho managed to keep his cool, denying Sky Sports the opportunity to show Scenes Nobody Wants To See on loop for the next 72 hours. How disappointing.

Of course, it’s a tough gig being a Video Assistant Referee. There you are, quietly trying to destroy the fabric of the nation’s most-beloved game, and people keep getting angry with you.

And, finally, it’s a tough gig playing against Liverpool. There are teams that are better at controlling games, there are teams that are better at defending, and there are many teams that have a mascot that isn’t a 7’ bird with teeth. But it’s hard to think of any team in recent years that has been so effective and reliably punishing.

It doesn’t take much. A full-back out of position. A midfielder stepping out and missing a tackle. A striker having a meltdown in the box because he thinks there’s been a handball, all the while ignoring the ball bouncing loose at his feet, and his colleague shouting “the ball, Sergio, it’s right there, kick it, kick it to me, Sergio, for God’s sake,” or words to that effect. Then ping, ping, ping, and Liverpool are up the other end and there’s, like, 12 of them, and everybody’s out of position.

And then, most of the time: goal.

Can they keep doing it? Or more precisely: can enough teams stop them doing it enough times that somebody else can get close to them? Because thanks to Sunday, Liverpool don’t have to be good enough to beat Manchester City at any point between here and the open-top bus parade.

City don’t quite need snookers, but they certainly need favours. Perhaps they’ll come from Chelsea and Leicester, or perhaps from Manchester United, the only team to have taken points form Liverpool so far. Most likely, they’ll have to come from Liverpool’s side of things: a rash of injuries, a collapse after their FIFA-mandated junket to Qatar, a blazing row between the full-backs and the front three. Something weird, or something mundane, but something disruptive.

All that, and City will need to put something brilliant together themselves. And they can, of course they can. They’re the champions, they’ve got Guardiola, and they’re incredibly good and incredibly rich. Still, it’s a tough gig, trying to catch Liverpool. They’re very, very good. Brace yourselves.