City win 3-0 at Anfield and the first two goals together were worth a seventh of a goal

For an hour at Anfield, almost only Liverpool shot. Twelve attempts to four, the ball always there, the stadium pushing.

Then, in the 93rd minute, the scoreboard read 0-3.

This is not one of those matches where the numbers contradict the result. It is worse, and more interesting: here the numbers explain why that possession was never dangerous, and why City could win it without even playing well.

Thirteen shots, no chances

Liverpool finished with 0.76 expected goals from thirteen attempts. That is six hundredths per shot, which is the average value of a shot from outside the box against a set defence.

Their biggest chance of the whole match is a Jacquet header in the 20th minute from a corner, worth 0.133. One time in eight. There was nothing else: no clear chance, no duel won inside the box, no shot the keeper really had to look at. Iraola's Liverpool had the ball and did not know what to do with it, and the result says that as well as the model does.

Entries into the box tell the same story from another angle: three, against City's eleven.

The two goals that decided the match were worth 0.146

Haaland in the 65th minute scores from 0.089. Doku in the 68th minute scores from 0.057. Together they make fourteen and a half hundredths of a goal: less than a seventh. In three minutes City turned two attempts into 2-0, attempts that on average go in once in seven and once in seventeen.

Haaland, two minutes earlier, had missed the only decent chance of his evening, from 0.264. In order: he misses the good one, he scores the impossible one. That is City's entire season in five minutes.

We wrote it before the break and it still holds: fifteen points out of fifteen from 9.59 expected, the biggest surplus in the Premier League. Now it is eighteen.

But then there is Cherki

In the 78th minute comes the only shot of the match that deserved to go in: 0.752, three times out of four. Mathis Cherki scores it, and the 3-0 is the only one of the three goals that needs no explanation.

Before the break, Cherki was the name we had flagged as a debt: 3 goals from 1.06 expected goals, one of the widest gaps in the league. On Sunday he did the opposite, meaning he scored the goal a striker has to score. It is not a redemption, it is one of those things that even themselves out: whoever scores far above their output will sooner or later score below it, and whoever plays in that position, with those teammates, keeps getting the chances.

What remains

City are top with eighteen points from eighteen and have won at Anfield, which is not something you explain with luck. But the gap between what they produce and what they collect keeps widening, and the season is long.

Liverpool, on the other hand, have a different and more serious problem: they lost at home without creating, which is the first time this year that the result and the performance have gone in the same wrong direction. Until Sunday, Iraola had won his worst matches and drawn his best ones, and the model gave him more than he had. Now it does not.

T.L.

The match by match verdict is in the Meritometro. For those who want models and not headlines, there is the Nerd Zone.