All-English Champions League ties are always enthralling - Liverpool vs Manchester City has plenty to live up to

There is a familiarity between the two sides involved in these games that itself makes one-country ties so distinctive and so different in themselves

All-Premier League ties in the Champions League have featured some unforgettable moments (AFP)

For all the talk about how this is the tie that both Liverpool and Manchester City most wanted to avoid, and would rather not play, the moods around their training grounds right now don’t tally with that. Both squads are very confident.

Liverpool know they are one of only two teams to have beaten City this season, and that their specific approach means they can give the Premier League leaders a better game than anybody. City meanwhile know that they have already thumped Liverpool 5-0, and that they are fundamentally a much better team, as the league table proves.

It is that knowledge - and that familiarity - that itself makes one-country ties so distinctive, so different in themselves. Jamie Carragher once described these encounters as “strange”, and he’d know better than most, given his Liverpool were better acquainted with them than most. This quarter-final tie will be the 11th time that two English clubs have met in a European Cup or Champions League knock-out, and the Anfield club will have been involved in seven, with that 2004-09 side playing in five.

Their series of matches against Chelsea have become the go-to reference for these meetings, and also best illustrate how they can be so distinctive - and distorted as actual matches. Liverpool for example won the first two, in 2004-05 and 2006-07, even though they were in both seasons way behind Chelsea in the table. That has just about been the trend, too. Of the 10 all-English Champions League ties so far, six have been won by the inferior side, at least going by where they were in the league.

Three of the other four were won by Sir Alex Ferguson’s supreme 2007-11 Manchester United - with the 2007-09 group arguably the only Premier League side that have been superior to City in the last decade.

United actually began to reverse a trend actually started in the very first such meeting, way back in 1978-79. Domestic champions Nottingham Forest began the season poorly, but still managed to knock out a supremely on-form Liverpool who were themselves defending European champions. Many Forest players were actually disappointed to draw Bob Paisley’s “Kings of Europe”, but not because of that form. In their first proper continental tie, they wanted the novelty - and the special feeling - of a proper continental trip.

This is the other fundamental element that that can further skew games.

Garcia's ghost goal remains one of the most iconic moments of these games (AFP)

Drawing a domestic rival instantly removes some of the specialness of European football, that has traditionally involved rich clashes of football cultures that required more sophisticated thinking. Except, it is the very familiarity of the sides that thereby increases the importance of tactics, with the international dimension then only amplifying more parochial issues. Teams - and especially their supporters - become even more animated about the possibility of enduring the worst possible elimination, or enjoying the best possibly victory; one that means everything. This is why so many of these games are so tense, as those Chelsea-Liverpool and Forest-Liverpool ties perfectly displayed.

There is then the fact that sides who are so used to playing each other in single league games must also navigate the extra knock-out complications of two legs and away goals.

This was something that really cost Liverpool in that very first all-English tie back in September 1978.

Liverpool triumphed over Arsenal in the 2008 quarter-finals (Getty)

After a period when Paisley’s side badly struggled to score against the Forest team that had usurped them in England, there was a lot of bad blood between the teams. That came out when Forest went 1-0 up in the first leg at the City Ground, and many Liverpool players began to growl that “one won’t be enough”. Their approach said otherwise. Liverpool poured forward in search of an equaliser, only to leave themselves open to Colin Barrett’s clincher. Many Forest players couldn’t help going by Emlyn Hughes and Phil Thompson asking whether two would be enough.

Those words added colour to the game, but Paisley’s explained the context of Liverpool’s elimination.

“If the game had been abroad we’d have settled for that,” the Anfield great said of the 1-0 scoreline. “We left ourselves exposed and the result of that over-adventure was a second Forest goal.”

Terry's missed penalty in 2008 cost Chelsea (Getty)

Really, Liverpool had made the mistake of treating it like a league game rather than a European leg, leaving themselves with too much to do for the return. Rafa Benitez would never make that mistake.

Reflecting on their victories over Chelsea three decades later in his book ‘Champions League Dreams’, the Spaniard proudly boasted about their knock-out nous.

“Our expertise that season lay in Europe, though, in the art of the knockout competition, the management of 180 minutes, the tactical preparation needed to overcome opponents expected to best us,” Benitez said. “This was a competition no team understood better than us.”

This is a dynamic Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp will have to be conscious of. There’s also the intrigue that the intimate knowledge of each other actually affords the smallest tactical details even more importance, because their effects will be maximised.

Anelka took the losing kick in Moscow (Getty)

One of the key factors in the only all-English final, in 2008, for example, was Cristiano Ronaldo’s initial targeting of Michael Essien at right-back, but then Chelsea’s response to that. They began to use Essien’s power to exploit the space left behind the Manchester United star. That led to a United victory on penalties, rather than in normal time.

“On such occasions, things are decided by the finest margins,” Benitez said.

It is the fact that familiarity so maximises small tactical details that also maximises other conditioning factors - like psychology.


 Lampard settled a classic between Chelsea and Liverpool in 2009 
 (AFP)

“We fed off the crowd,” Carragher explained of 2005, in something that is set to have an echo in 2018. “You can’t quantify how important the crowd was, because there are no statistics… the crowd inspired us as players but it affected Chelsea’s players too.”

By the same token, though, Chelsea’s desire for revenge - and to finally beat Liverpool in one of these games - was believed by their players to be crucial by 2007-08. They were just energised for it to an elevated level, while Liverpool were just naturally unable to get up for it in the same way. The fixture had become too familiar.

Arsenal’s failings were however just too familiar to United in 2009. Ferguson merely ensured that his team did what they always do against Arsene Wenger’s team and picked them off, and that brought the result they nearly always got: a hugely convincing win. Ronaldo’s goal in the second leg of that 2008-09 semi-final remains one of the stand-out moments from these ties.

Ronaldo's goal sealed the semi-final second leg against Arsenal in 2009 (Manchester United)

This season’s pairing could yet prove the stand-out encounter. That is what it feels like it’s building up to, because of how City and Liverpool play. Even a high-scoring game, though, would be nothing new.

Liverpool-Chelsea’s 2008-09 quarter-final meeting ended up going against the low-scoring tension of the previous games, and producing a 4-4 draw in the second leg and 7-5 aggregate score.

This is the other thing with these games. They’re always either tensely immersive or impressively entertaining, and never dull.

In that respect, the familiarity only breeds contentment.