Any debates around these two clubs can easily get very fraught, very quickly. So it’s worth highlighting one indisputable truth as a starting point.
Liverpool under Jurgen Klopp are an absolutely magnificent football team.
From a Manchester City point of view, once the dust settles on this era of elite sporting rivalry between the best sides in England, we will be grateful Klopp’s Liverpool existed.
Greatness is most easily measured by the quality of your biggest foe. Muhammad Ali had Joe Frazier, Roger Federer had Rafael Nadal and City and Liverpool have one another right now.
There is an argument to be made that they are the two best teams ever to have played in England’s top flight.
But such proximity can breed tetchiness, if not outright contempt, and the noises emanating from Anfield of late have started to become a little tiresome.
“City have come through the December month particularly well. Few injuries, few corona attacks, that helps enormously," Virgil van Dijk said in an interview with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf.
“At the same time as me, Fabinho and Thiago tested positive. Three boys in the axis of the team.”
Thiago must be delighted that his patchy Liverpool career to date is being held in such high regard, but the main takeaway from Van Dijk’s comments was how they continued a theme.
"[Playing on December] 26th and 28th is absolutely impossible,” Klopp said in the midst of a festive fixture schedule where Liverpool’s scheduled Boxing Day fixture was postponed due to a coronavirus outbreak at Leeds United before the Reds lost to a similarly depleted Leicester City.
“City might have the squad for two games, 11 players and go through the Premier League. But other teams cannot do that. It's really tricky and that's the problem."
Last season, when City had a game at Everton cancelled due to a spike in COVID-19 cases, Klopp inaccurately claimed it resulted in Pep Guardiola’s squad getting a two-week break.
This is not the place to start delving into false positives, whether or not games should be called off or who are football’s winners and losers out of a public health crisis. That’s just a race to the bottom where no one wins.
But these comments do suggest that, through their sheer relentlessness, Guardiola’s City have taken away what was once presumed to be Liverpool’s key strength.
Klopp famously praised his squad for being “mentality monsters” as they claimed a sixth Champions League crown in 2018/19 and followed it with a first English title for 30 years in 2019/20.
When City toiled during 2018 and 2019 fixtures at a baying Anfield, this was widely viewed as a big point of difference between the two sides. Guardiola’s men had been outfought and did not have the stomach for the fight on the big occasion. They had been shown to be mentally weaker than Liverpool.
It’s easy to lazily apply such a label when Liverpool play in the manner they do as the gregarious Klopp stalks his technical area. City’s more methodical style and Pep’s jumpy demeanour of a man into double figures on espressos for the day does not initially give the impression of a psychological powerhouse.
But just look at what City are doing this season, as they have in their previous successful campaigns. They are now up to 11 consecutive Premier League wins.
They won 14 in a row to pip Liverpool at the finishing post in 2018/19, while a host of records were broken during streaks in the 2017/18 and 2020/21 seasons.
City win and win and win some more and it chips steadily away at the resolve of anyone wanting to compete with them. Liverpool must feel like Andy Dufresne’s wall in Shawshank State Prison right now.
The New Year’s Day win at Arsenal is something of an outlier - City tend not to claim last-gasp wins that provide snapshot evidence of mental strength.
But to control matches as they do time and again, hitting Guardiola’s punishing and exacting standards day after day really does show phenomenal mental fortitude. Such brilliance does not just happen on account of throwing good players together.
City’s unflinching approach to what, on paper, looked like the toughest title race in a generation, shows they are now the true mentality monsters in the Premier League. No wonder Klopp and Van Dijk have been reduced to their “poor me” moaning.
Do you think City's mental strength under Pep Guardiola is underplayed? Follow the City Is Ours editor Dom Farrell on Twitter to get involved in the discussion and give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
