IAN LADYMAN: Jurgen Klopp’s X-factor at Liverpool is impossible to replace. In their last frenetic dance at Anfield, a red blizzard threatened to engulf Man City – and Pep Guardiola has never solved the German’s puzzle

Standing on the touchline, hands on his head with the smell of sulphur in the air, Pep Guardiola had been here before. 

Looking out at a swirl of red – a blizzard of red – threatening to engulf his team of champions, a Liverpool team propelled forward on a diet of emotion, adrenalin and purpose. 

This has been Liverpool during Guardiola’s years in the Premier League with Manchester City. This has been Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool. Soon it will be different and Guardiola – deep in his coach’s heart – will know that better than most.

Whatever happens between now and the season’s end – whoever wins this year’s Premier League – Guardiola will watch Klopp walk away knowing that he never quite managed to solve the puzzle. 

Guardiola has more league titles to his name and as such can lay claim to having dominated the English top flight in a way nobody previously had in the modern age. Still, though, he has never managed to find the solution to the deep and complex challenges presented to him by Klopp’s Liverpool teams.

Liverpool played as the mirror image of their manager, brimming with intensity in Europe’s best atmosphere 

Here, as the home team recovered from a first half that had seen them bettered, Guardiola simply watched a similar story unfold. As the saying goes, he had seen this movie before. 

Liverpool playing with an intensity it was impossible to match in an atmosphere not bettered anywhere in Europe. Liverpool playing in a way that didn’t really make sense given the rather patched-up nature of their line up. Liverpool presenting a challenge as emotional as it was tactical. Liverpool, in short, playing in the mirror image of their manager.

And this is the cold truth of it for Liverpool as they attempt to move forward without Klopp from the end of this season. Speaking about this last Friday, Klopp was modest. Of course he was. The club is set up to succeed, he said. And he is right but only to a degree.

This emerging Liverpool generation – one featuring such irresistible talents as Darwin Nunez and Conor Bradley and Harvey Elliott – has a long-term look about it but the X-factor Klopp beings to this team and this football club will be impossible to replace and on afternoons such as this one that is hard to ignore.

The second half was in itself a microcosm of what has often happened between these teams. Not always. City have had their good days. But often it has been like this, City dragged from their shape and their comfort zone into the type of football game they never otherwise play. Open, stretched, unpredictable, untidy, thrilling. 

This is not Guardiola football. No, Guardiola football is measured, controlled, secure and angular. Liverpool play rolling maul football and that comes from Klopp. To expect his successor to replicate it is as unfair as it would be unrealistic. Somehow, he will have to find another way.

Looking at the teams for this game, the advantage appeared to be City’s. Liverpool had four of their first choice back five missing. Mo Salah had not recovered from injury in time to make it further than the substitutes’ bench. 

So though this never looked like an easy afternoon for City, it hinted at what did indeed occur during the opening 45 minutes. It was a half that ended with City in the lead and with Liverpool having registered just one shot on target, from a free-kick in the third minute of added time.

But the thing about Liverpool at Anfield is that when the emotional switch is flicked, everything can change. Here the catalyst for that was one short back pass by City’s otherwise excellent defender Nathan Ake. 

Manchester City’s cerebral, measured style meets fire and thunder in Liverpool’s red blizzard

Guardiola’s team were dragged from their shape and forced out of their comfort zone 

After Alexis Mac Allister’s penalty, Liverpool entered a dreamlike state of higher energy and purpose 

Once that mistake had been made and Alexis MacAllister had made good the penalty that duly came his way, Liverpool entered that dreamlike state of higher energy and purpose that most sporting teams can only dream of.

From that point on Guardiola’s City were hanging on in a way that they never really have to do. Good players started to make poor decisions and make mistakes. Liverpool began to be offered space in which to work that was not there in the first half. 

Liverpool really could have won, too. The two chances spurned by Luis Diaz were good ones. City’s players looked stressed and anxious. On the touchline Guardiola argued with Kevin de Bruyne while ten yards away Klopp stood in his own technical area and grinned at the Liverpool crowd.

It was sporting theatre at its best. Nobody in the Main Stand could bring themselves to sit down. When the board went up for eight minutes of added time, Anfield had long since disregarded the value of the draw. This is not how Klopp thinks and, as a result, not how they think.

That draw was, just about, the right result. At the end we had another classic of the Klopp-Guardiola genre to treasure. This one had everything the two men have given us over the years wrapped up in one mad, frantic, perfect game of football.

A 1-1 outcome may have been a result for the smart money at the outset but the scoreline wasn’t the beauty of this game. That was to be found in its utterly unpredictable rhythms, its freneticism, its energy and the repetitive collision of its respective forces.

This was another Klopp-Guardiola classic to treasure, encapsulating everything they have given us over the years 

A patched-up Liverpool team fed off the atmosphere and Klopp to reach a higher level

Whoever succeeds Klopp would probably be foolish to try and replicate him. So, how do you follow him?

‘Bring the Noise’ is the name of a very good biography of Klopp. Never has a book been better titled. This was another din at Anfield on Sunday. Guardiola’s City will be better for its absence from this point but what of Liverpool? What will they be? How will they feel? 

It’s an uncomfortable question. Whatever Klopp’s successor is, he surely cannot be this. It would probably be foolish to try. Shaping Liverpool’s future will present a challenge of almost unthinkable proportions.