There will be smoke, noise and a sense of authentic event glamour. People will shout at a bus. The TV graphics will woosh and sparkle. In due course a skinny-legged man will perform high-speed tactical mime on the touchline, revolving both hands and yanking at invisible levers, as though reversing an imaginary submarine.
There will surely be goals too. Liverpool and Manchester City have mustered 50 between them in their past 14 games before their bravura meeting at Anfield on Sunday afternoon. But this also feels like a game that might just be marked by misses too, by shanks, muffs, scuffs, crossbar-wobbling hoicks. Chances will be taken. And in between, chances – Big Chances – will also be missed.
There is always a temptation to soft-pedal the hypebefore a fixture as obviously mouthwatering as this meeting of the Premier League’s top two. We know the iconography of these occasions, the talk of duels, head-to-heads, title moments to be seized.
The reality is often different. Experience suggests there are no one-shot title deciders, not with 10 games to be played, with Arsenal heavily in the mix, and a fixture list that suggests the three-way title race may yet be decided by how well you can do against Spurs.
And yet this does still feel like a genuine tie-breaker, given the recent history of final-day chases. It also feels like an unusually open prospect, two teams whose attacking blueprint has been configured around hugely watchable, entirely contrasting, but in some ways oddly aligned central strikers.
Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez has been a fun comparison ever since they arrived in England a few days apart for similar fees, unusually athletic and agile 6ft-plus centre-forwards. They have turned out to be fascinating for other reasons too, key players whose strengths are, as a matter of form and style, inescapably related to their moments of weakness.
On one side, Haaland, the pure goalscoring phenomenon, razor edge in a treble-winning team, who also seems, in isolated moments, to be playing with a set of trowels strapped to his feet. On the other the Premier League’s own lord of misrule, a footballer who doesn’t so much contribute to a game of football as crash into it, cartwheeling about at the centre of Jürgen Klopp’s attack to increasingly convincing effect.
Both are having 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 concussive, creative gegenpressing of early Klopp.
Along the way the high-profile miss, the uber-shank has been a prominent feature of both teams’ seasons. There is nothing novel in Liverpool and City being at the summit of the Premier League’s Big Chances Missed table (Liverpool top on 52; City two behind). This is in part a numbers game. The best teams make more chances. As such they score more and also miss more. Missing a chance is simply what good players do, in between wrecking your hopes and dreams with their shark-like refusal to be cowed or understand this as an act of human weakness.
