Manchester City Fan View: Guardiola's men finally suffer league defeat

So, it turns out Manchester City aren’t invincible after all. After 30 Premier League games without defeat – 22 of which have come this season – they finally fell to Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool. The Reds won 4-3 a Anfield in a game that truly lived up to its billing as the most exciting match of the campaign.

Liverpool will take all the credit. They will rightly celebrate a momentous victory that moves them to 18 unbeaten matches and offered proof that, with a half decent goalkeeper and an improved ability to keep it tight, they might put up a serious title-challenge next season.

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For Pep Guardiola and his men, this loss represents the start of a new challenge and ushers in the next phase of the season. It seems like every week, the boss has had to answer the question, “Can you finish the season unbeaten?” He’s continued to find different ways to answer, “No.” Now, Liverpool have resoundingly proven him right.

The good thing for City is that tests like that at Anfield will be few and far between. It would be easy to look upon this as Liverpool setting the blueprint for how to beat City. However, there is no other team in the league that plays like Liverpool. Klopp’s conglomerate of pacey, attack-minded players slot together as beautifully as Tetris blocks. There is not another side in England that could play like that against The Blues.

It can’t go without note, though, that for Liverpool’s undoubted quality, City were still the masters of their own downfall. Their opponents pressed well, but Pep’s men were sloppy getting the ball out from the back and in trying to attack out of midfield. That was not Liverpool’s doing, it was a rare off day from the travelling side.

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The new challenge is making sure the team bounces straight back. The reality is that to lose is always disappointing, but if ever there’s a time to suffer a league defeat it’s when you’ve already built up a 15-point cushion at the top. That could be reduced to a still-rather-handy 12 points if Manchester United topple Stoke City on Monday night.

That should mean that there’s no great wobble. Psychologically, there’s no sudden pressure from the teams below City that will scare them. Their task is to re-focus, get this loss out of their system and then beat a struggling Newcastle at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday.

Guardiola is a perfectionist so the mistakes his team made will hurt him today. But he’s also a realist – he’s long known that a defeat would come and now he has a good understanding of how his team react to setbacks against a ruthless opponent. In this case, it was to have a reckless 10 minutes where they went from 1-1 to 4-1 down. On the flip side, they rallied to make the last five minutes extremely tense. They left it too late to snatch an unlikely point, but City did show that even in the most adverse circumstances they keep playing. It’s not worth anything tangible, but it’s still to their credit.

As we move into the stage of the season where we hope the team maintains a challenge in all four available competitions, there is something to be said for taking a knock at this stage. It’s true that you learn nothing from never falling, but everything in standing up after you fall. In that regard, this could be City’s greatest lesson of the season.