Georginio Wijnaldum scored the winning goal when Liverpool met Manchester City at Anfield just over a year ago and he remembers it well because it was a header. “I was lucky,” he says with a shrug. “It is a good moment to look back on but we need to be looking forward to the next match. Every game is a new game and anything can happen. I think City now have a better team than they have had in the past, so there’s no point looking back on the history.”
The league table would appear to suggest the same thing and Liverpool’s Dutch midfielder believes City have earned their place at the top. “I think they have been more consistent than anyone else this season and also I think they have had a bit more luck than we have,” Wijnaldum says. “We have had a few good games but at the end we didn’t get the result we wanted. That has rarely happened to City.
“It’s not luck that they have won with a few late goals, it shows their quality. They focus until the last minute of the game because they know they can make a goal. They have that confidence but I think the biggest difference this season on last is their consistency.
“Week in, week out they have good performances and, even if they are not quite at their best, they still manage to win. They don’t give games away.”
Liverpool are ostensibly weakened at the moment through the departure of Philippe Coutinho for Barcelona, even if they did use the January window to bring in Wijnaldum’s compatriot Virgil van Dijk for a record £75m. “I have played with Virgil before and he is a natural leader,” Wijnaldum says. “He speaks a lot in the dressing room and he talks to the players in front of him on the pitch. He does that for the national team as well. That’s why he was captain of Southampton. We spoke a few times when he was making up his mind about his future. I told him how the club was and everything. I said Liverpool is a great club but I think he already knew that.”
Wijnaldum admits Liverpool will miss Coutinho but argues any team would. “Every team would miss a player of that quality. He was one of the best players we had in the team but as a person he was even better,” the 27-year-old says. “He wanted to go to his dream club and as players we are all happy for him because he is such a good guy. He was never arrogant, you never heard him say: ‘I am the best,’ or anything like that. Phil was always a guy who listened to the coaching and worked with the team. We all enjoyed playing with him. It is sad he didn’t stay, because with Phil in the team of course we were better, but in the end you have to be happy that he made the move that meant so much to him.”
The break-up of the Fab Four may also offer an opportunity for Wijnaldum, who has not been a regular starter this season, though he insists Jürgen Klopp is not the sort of manager to ask him to step up his game. “He does not put that kind of pressure on players,” he says. “The only pressure the manager puts on us is to give 100% and try to use the quality we have. The only time you see him upset is if he thinks you are not giving 100%. If you’re nervous or scared or you don’t try to do the things you are good at, that’s when he’ll get angry.
“The most important thing as far as he is concerned is that we perform well as a group. He’s always telling us we can only win as a group, not as individuals. It makes it easier if every player performs but, if you do it well as a group, you can reach more.”
Wijnaldum believes City were lucky when beating Liverpool 5-0 at the Etihad in September because they were playing 10 men for most of the time. “What Sadio [Mané] did was an accident. Sometimes you see a red card, sometimes a yellow,” he says of the incident when the Senegal forward caught Ederson with a boot in the face as the City goalkeeper headed the ball clear just outside his penalty area. “There was a similar situation in a game between Newcastle and Swansea just afterwards and Matt Ritchie just got a yellow, so to that extent we were unlucky at City; from the moment Sadio got a red card it was always going to be difficult.
“But you can’t blame luck or a red card for losing by five goals. We did a few things wrong and City showed their quality. Hopefully when we meet at Anfield it will stay 11 v 11 and that way we will have more of a chance.”