There will be smoke, noise and a sense of authentic event glamour. People will yell at a bus. The TV graphics will whoosh and sparkle. In due time, a man with skinny legs will perform tactical mime exercises at high speed on the sidelines, twisting both hands and jerking invisible levers, as if reversing an imaginary submarine.
There will certainly be goals too. Liverpool and Manchester City have put together 50 in their last fourteen matches ahead of their bravura encounter at Anfield on Sunday afternoon. But this also feels like a game that is perhaps also characterized by misses, by scissors, sleeves, scuffs, wobbly cross-hoicks. Opportunities will be taken. And in between, opportunities – Big Chances – are also missed.
There is always the temptation to tone down the hype before a match as obviously mouth-watering as this meeting of the Premier League’s top two. We know the iconography of these occasions, the talk of duels, head-to-head confrontations and title moments that must be seized.
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The reality is often different. Experience shows there are no one-shot title deciders, not with ten games to play, with Arsenal heavily in the mix, and a fixture list suggesting the treble title race may still be decided by how well you can perform against Spurs.
And yet, this still feels like a real tiebreaker, given the recent history of final day chases. It also feels like an unusually open prospect, two teams whose attacking blueprint is configured around hugely discernible, completely contrasting, but in some ways oddly aligned central strikers.
Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez have made for an entertaining comparison since they arrived in England a few days apart for similar fees, unusually athletic and agile at over six feet tall as centre-forwards. They’ve proven fascinating for other reasons, too: protagonists whose strengths of form and style are inescapably linked to their moments of weakness.
On the one hand, Haaland, the pure goal-scoring phenomenon, the sharp edge of a treble-winning team, who in isolated moments also seems to play with a set of trowels at his feet. On the other, the lord of the Premier League’s mismanagement, a footballer who doesn’t so much contribute to a football match as crash into it, spinning into the middle of Jürgen Klopp’s attack with increasingly convincing effect.
Both have excellent seasons. Haaland as a point of tactical evolution for the great midfield fetishist Pep Guardiola; Núñez as a slight return, a shift closer to the concussion, creative gegenpressing of the early Klopp.
During the high-profile miss, the uber-shank was a notable feature of both teams’ seasons. There’s nothing new about Liverpool and City sitting at the top of the Premier League’s Big Chances Missed rankings (Liverpool top at 52; City two behind). This is partly a numbers game. The best teams have more chances. As a result, they score more and miss more. Missing an opportunity is just what good players do, destroying your hopes and dreams in between with their shark-like refusal to be intimidated or understand this as an act of human weakness.
But there are two interesting sub-points here. Firstly, the clear leading role of both centre-forwards in those Major Missed Opportunities. Haaland tops the individual rankings with 26. Núñez is second, also at around 50% of his team’s total, and both are on track to beat last season’s results.
Again it’s not hard to understand why. City’s entire game is now based on finding ways to create openings for the designated finisher. This is a team that has constant possession in the attacking third. Missing some of Haaland’s chances will obviously be a feature of the day, not least when the cinematic miss delivers a clear note of variation in an otherwise clean and repetitively dominant game. As was the case with last week’s Alpha miss at the Etihad, Haaland appeared out of the sky like a stricken airship and clinked the ball not just slightly, but absolutely miles over the crossbar.
A notable part of Haaland’s particular style of missing – the power miss, all the tangled feet and pirouette violence – is the way these moments relate to his superpowers. Haaland’s standout feature is that unparalleled combination of size, speed and precision. Usain Bolt was unique in that he possessed the stride length of a large man, and the speed and quickness of a full-sized sprinter. Haaland has the same combination of outsized qualities and application on a human scale. Electricity at close range, combined with the ability to turn and run from 30 meters, the point from which he is effectively unstoppable, becomes irresistible over time.
It is also why he will miss chances that way, because the way City play more often asks him to use the more complicated tools, those quick passing opportunities close to the goal. And because when that part of his game is off, he will miss with verve, he will remind us that this is a big man who has to work in small spaces. So instead of shaved posts we get spectacular thuds into the ground, or headers over the crossbar where he appears to be trying to cram his body into the backseat of a three-door sedan.
Haaland doesn’t worry about misses and never lets himself be deterred from putting the same energy into every involvement, because he knows that that way he will ultimately succeed. Of some concern for City will be the periods where he disappears from the game completely, as has sometimes been the case against better teams with better one-on-one defenders. With Haaland as the focus, City are both deadlier and more vulnerable, more vulnerable to the counter-attack. He may not be a player with long range or deeper acceleration, but his presence still defines this team from back to front.
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In recent months, Núñez has exerted a similar degree of influence on Liverpool, albeit along a very different pattern. Even his misses are different. Núñez’s specialty in the snatch or the skew, the miss where he seems to be in complete control of his body but is still able to shoot strangely wide, to crush the post with senseless force and precision.
Once again, these misses are the other side of his main power, which is to create constant, hypermobile disorder. Núñez is not equipped to match Haaland’s goal. But this season he has 21 tackles and interceptions, 592 touches, 36 take-ons, 2,149 meters of ball carrying, figures that are considerably high for his position.
These figures reflect the reality of a creative presence that the ancient Greeks would have characterized as “frenzy,” a swirling series of collisions, angles, shots, decoys. Núñez is always on the move, always in contact with the nearest enemy body, and rarely lurks in space, waiting for his sniper’s shot. And just like Haaland, those misses are a natural part of the qualities he brings. Despite all the lean periods, the last time Liverpool lost to Núñez in the starting eleven was in March last year.
Both managers, Guardiola to a greater extent, have always craved control, winning competitions by keeping the ball and reducing the variables in a match. Neither feels that way right now, for a match that will, as always, be decided by moments taken and missed.