Díaz captures tone and energy but cannot find winner in draw for ages

With nine minutes left in this breathless 1-1 draw, an impossibly intricate 1-1, a 1-1 draw for the ages, Luis Díaz set off down the left touchline. This is a footballer who always seems from first minute to last to be in the process of fleeing a burning building, who has no cruise setting or eco gear, who is always straight into Insanity Mode.

Díaz weaved inside Kyle Walker with a matadorial drag-back, dodged Rodri, zipped off towards the six-yard box, forced a corner, then collapsed to the turf, muscles screaming with lactic acid, shouting at the crowd from a seated position, a man who at that moment basically couldn’t walk any more, still out there trying to fight the day.

Díaz’s performance seemed to capture the tone and texture of this game, the constant collision between energy and control. Manchester City had dominated the first half while looking like a team from a more advanced sporting galaxy, striding about the place in their space‑jumpsuits, kitted out with superior tech, a firmer grasp of logic, greater access to teleportation devices.

After the break it was Liverpool’s turn to apply a more disruptive energy. In that period Díaz missed at least three yawningly open chances to score. He also never stopped, or settled, or seemed able to tear himself away from the spectacle.

In fact, nobody here stopped at any point. And there was a rare kind of beauty to all this. Elite sport is so often pain and fear and living on your nerves. Football is so often acrimony and rage. What was most striking here was how much the players enjoyed this game.

It felt like a kind of high, a reminder that a 1-1 draw over 90 minutes retains the capacity to express so much drama, so many moments of shifting energy. The Premier League may be faced with its own concealed horizon, shifting forces off stage, court dates looming, the antigravity of its own economic heft. Who knows how long this thing will last in this form? But it remains a sensational sporting league, still romping through its own Hollywood golden age era.

Alexis Mac Allister (centre) impressed in midfield and scored Liverpool’s equaliser from the penalty spot. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

By the end here it felt significant that the most influential player on the pitch was probably Alexis Mac Allister, if only because Mac Allister had spent the first half ratting, dogging, ferreting, chasing the blue shirts as they drifted by.

Anfield had been a dank and chilly place at kick-off on one of those days where the top of the stand feels like a headland facing out into the Irish sea. That full baroque musical brocade was there at kick-off, the pageantry of signs and banners and bedsheets, names, history, feelings, hunches, magic.

It is all part of the attempt to create a narrative, a way to win. The fact is this City team is a generational winning machine. Here they simply blew Liverpool away at the start, making the pitch feel tiny, cutting off angles, making every single pass or shift of direction a puzzle to be solved.

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For long periods John Stones was the outstanding player on the pitch, not just moonlighting as a midfielder these days, but the key controlling presence, taking the ball on the half turn, setting the tempo, breaking up the play, a spidery Xavi. He scored the opening goal from a supremely well‑executed corner routine. Through that period Stones was a cold clear blue shaft of light as Liverpool tried to create static, friction, sparks.

It took one minute of the second half for the game to change. Darwin Núñez had an extraordinary game here. At one point he had as many offsides against his name (five) as he did completed passes. In between he wheeled about like an unruly labrador, overturning the dinner service, trampling your Lego set, barely seeming to play football at all at times, more a kind of exercise in parkour. But he was there to charge down Nathan Aké’s poor backpass and earn the penalty that made it 1-1.

Mac Allister took the kick, burying it in the top corner. And Mac Allister was excellent in that second half. He still ratted and ferreted, never dominating the play or controlling the tempo, because in that half this game seemed to exist outside of the players, a runaway entity in its own right.

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Mac Allister has grown as the season has gone on. He is an unusual elite midfielder. Not quick, or tall or elegant, or obviously aristocratic in his style, but gifted with brilliant game‑smarts, fearlessness, and the ability to see a pass, to read the movements of the planets orbiting around him. By the end he had four shots at goal, four tackles, the goal, and endless bruising collisions to his name.

For a while Anfield threatened to throb with that old winning energy, the Kop end acting like a noise funnel. City were too strong to bend. They might have won it at the end. They did all this, it should be said while essentially playing with nine outfield players, as Erling Haaland had almost zero effect on the game, contained once again by top‑class defenders in a big game. One of these days he will turn one of these occasions for City. On days like these, for all his phenomenal numbers, it can feel a bit like watching a competition winner playing up front for the world champions, another note of variation in a wonderful game.