Gary Neville has shared his ‘gut feeling’ about how Liverpool’s heavyweight showdown against Manchester City on Sunday will transpire.
The Premier League’s current top two go into the fixture in wildly contrasting form, with the Reds winning 14 and drawing one of their last 15 matches, whereas the last six matches for Pep Guardiola‘s side have ended in five defeats and one draw (in which they threw away a 3-0 lead at home to Feyenoord).
The form book points very much in favour of a home win at Anfield, a result which’d put 11 points between the teams in the top-flight table.
Speaking on The Overlap US, Neville has backed Liverpool to heap further misery on Man City, although he warned that the champions could have extra motivation from their rare status as underdogs.
The Sky Sports pundit said: “I think Liverpool v City is really interesting. I’m doing the game and I can’t wait for it because there’s a lot riding on it. I’ve never seen City look as vulnerable in the Pep Guardiola era.
“Jamie Redknapp mentioned this and I thought it was a really good point, where he said that the pressure, all of a sudden, in this fixture is on Liverpool in the sense that everyone will expect Liverpool to win, because everyone is beating City!
“What will that do to Liverpool? I think Liverpool will win on Sunday. Looking at City at this moment in time, when you feel that intensity and passion that Liverpool have, I think they could run all over them is my gut feeling.
“But, but there is that Pep Guardiola, and these group of players have achieved a lot in this last four or five years. You could never write them off.
“Is this the day that basically they’re poked that much that they stir and something happens? It could be, but my feeling is that Liverpool win this game. The pressure, I think, is on Liverpool to win, more than it is on City to win on Sunday because of what’s happened.
“It’s mad to think that City have lost all those games in a row. It’s intriguing and I’m looking forward to it already.”
What we can state for certain is that it’s been a long time since Liverpool have gone into a match against Man City as such hot favourites and looking so vastly superior to Guardiola’s side.
Even when we won the corresponding fixture 3-1 in November 2019 to go eight points clear, the Etihad Stadium outfit weren’t enduring anything like the form which has blighted them over the past month.
Neville has raised that intriguing point from Redknapp about the visitors potentially forming a siege mentality from being widely written off and duly puncturing the Reds’ momentum, like Chelsea so infamously did in April 2014 and, to a lesser extent, Manchester United at Anfield last season.
However, we highly doubt that City would be as blatantly negative on Sunday as those two teams were, which could play into Liverpool’s hands.
It’d be foolish not to expect some sort of a response from the ailing champions, but if Arne Slot’s side reach the same standards that they showed in seeing off Real Madrid last night, it could well be another memorable evening in L4!
The post “It’s mad to think…” – Gary Neville shares ‘gut feeling’ prediction for Liverpool v Man City appeared first on The Empire of The Kop.
