Can we officially rule Manchester City out of the title race if they come a(nother) cropper at Anfield on Sunday? Feels naughty even to think it, but 11 points is a heck of a gap even for second-half-of-the-season City to reel in.
Game to watch: Liverpool v Manchester City
Don’t know about you, but if we were picking a ground where we had to go to play a must-win game to prevent our disorientating and apparently total loss of form escalating into a season-ending catastrophe then Anfield might not be our first choice.
That, though, is the task facing Pep Guardiola at the most beleaguered he has ever been and a team that has lost the entire run of itself. A five-game losing streak saw City crash out of the Carabao, drop some irrelevant but narrative-heavy Champions League points and most importantly lose three Premier League games in a row, the last of which surely represented a career low for everyone involved.
Team to watch: Aston Villa
Sky Sports may have pulled a Homer with their Super Sunday choices last week, with Ipswich v Manchester United suddenly becoming a much bigger draw than anyone could have expected thanks to Ruben Amorim and, it really quite irritatingly and rudely turned out, Ed Sheeran.
Player to watch: Martin Odegaard
Interesting, isn’t it, that each of the three best teams in the country have that one player who, like Lebowski’s rug, just tie everything together and make the whole thing work?
Interesting too that those three players are all so different. At City it is, of course, Rodri who cannot be replaced. He’s easily the least overtly noticeable of the three. Surrounded by more conspicuous players, Rodri’s work is the kind that you notice most clearly – and it really has been clear in the last few weeks – when it suddenly isn’t there. The whole machine just stops operating as efficiently, sometimes breaking down altogether.
Football League game to watch: Middlesbrough v Hull
The It’s Not Really Yorkshire Though Is It Derby sees Hull bidding to arrest a four-game losing run that has dropped them into the bottom three while Middlesbrough look to get their promotion bid back on track after their gleeful little run of goal-laden wins over QPR, Luton and Oxford came to a grinding halt against Blackburn in midweek.
European game to watch: Borussia Dortmund v Bayern Munich
The biggest game in German football has an extra dimension here for pitting Dortmund’s flawless home record (P6 W6) against Bayern’s almost flawless away
SOURCE – Liverpool could end Manchester City with Odegaard helping put pressure on six-pointer
