GROUNDS FOR CONCERN
You’d have got extremely short odds on touchline micro-management’s Pep Guardiola spending an uninterrupted 20 minutes sitting in thoughtful repose in the visitors’ dug-out at Anfield on Sunday, but he did exactly that before the game kicked off. As he surveyed Liverpool’s stadium, a towering edifice that seems to occupy a peculiar rent-free space in his head, The Fiver imagines he was envisaging potential scenarios that might unfold once the game began. When it ended and his intricate gameplan had been ruthlessly exposed by an agricultural late-80s-era Wimbledon long ball up the centre from Allison Beasant to Mo Fashanu, he laid the blame for his side’s defeat squarely at the Shankly Gates of his concrete nemesis.
