Somehow, there were six cautions in the game between Manchester City and Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium last Saturday. If memory serves right, most - if not all - were for tactical fouls.
It really isn't long ago that the City-Liverpool rivalry had a serious edge to it. On and off the pitch. Not any more.
That the off-the-pitch enmity seems to have been diluted is no bad thing. And no-one wants spitefulness to play a prominent part in Premier League matches.
But the respect between these two sets of players is now producing very civilised matches. There was some craziness toward the end of the Premier League match between the two at Anfield in February, but that all centred on the bizarre Dominik Szoboszlai-Erling Haaland incident.
Szoboszlai was dismissed for illegally denying Haaland a clear goalscoring opportunity and that is the only straight red card given to a Liverpool player in the Premier League this season. In the Premier League, only five teams have fewer yellow cards than Liverpool this season.
Enough has been rightly said about Hugo Ekitike’s and Rayan Cherki’s decision to swap shirts before the end of the match the other day. But they would have thought nothing of it. They are mates.
And without being flippant, a lot of the City and Liverpool players are mates. They probably have dinner together in South Cheshire.
And there is nothing wrong with that. But their occasional love-ins would have Roy Keane going into meltdown.
The broader, more important point regarding Liverpool’s struggles this season is whether or not Arne Slot’s team is too nice, too fair, too reluctant to resort to the so-called dark arts. The problem with seeing those things as a negative is that there seems to be little difference from last season when they won the Premier League in a relative canter.
Being honest and fair did not hinder Liverpool then. And Arsenal are currently not only top of the Premier League table, they are top of the Fair Play League table.
You don’t have to be nasty and sly to win. But by his own admission, Slot does not encourage time-wasting even if the situation appears to call for it.
Delaying tactics might have headed off City’s second goal in first half added time in that FA Cup quarter-final, for example. Haaland’s penalty had given City a head of steam and Liverpool could have done more to disrupt the game’s flow.
That is not in Slot’s game plan and the reality is that Liverpool have become a team that is, for want of a better word, ‘nice’ to play against. It goes without saying that, over the years, Liverpool have had a history of great players who also had an edge to them, to say the least.
It is hard to put any of the current crop in that category. A couple seem to have lost a touch of intensity. I’m thinking Alexis Mac Allister and even Curtis Jones, when he gets game-time.
You cannot train intensity and perhaps the realisation that fourth or fifth place is going to be the limit of this season’s Premier League ambitions has extinguished their fire. Slot can only hope a night in Paris can relight it.
