Liverpool and Manchester City managers have brought the best out of one another to usher in golden age of English football
t will, as ever, be a clash of contrasts. The joy machine against the tortured genius. Extrovert versus introvert. Low-slung baseball cap versus designer knitwear, ordered chaos versus chaotic order, 4-3-3 versus who-the-hell-knows, blood red versus cool blue, the hair transplant against the immaculate bald pate. For the past eight years, this is thefans have developed for each other over the years, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola could never truly bring themselves to hate each other.
For Klopp, the stratospheric standards set by Guardiola’s City persuaded him that his Liverpool team would need to rein in their anarchic side in order to challenge for the title, to develop better and more reliable ways of recycling the ball against deep-set defences. Training exercises were increasingly geared towards structured attacking patterns, repeatable movements, drilled actions such as two men making dummy runs in the same direction so a third could exploit the space they created.