Jurgen Klopp won't bow to the Man City Super Power: Liverpool travel to TOP

A landmark slipped by on Thursday. November 23 marked 10 years since Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola first locked horns in a domestic league game.

The setting was Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion, the occasion German football’s biggest match. Guardiola masterminded a 3-0 win, Bayern Munich swatting Dortmund’s black-and-yellow wasps, and celebrated it by burying his head in a laptop on a flight home, looking for faults in his team’s performance.

Since then, Klopp has become adept at striking back. He has not gone head-to-head with another manager more in his career than Guardiola (28 times) and, currently, the Liverpool boss is in profit: 12 wins to 11 defeats, with five draws.

This head-to-head has become an enduring tale of the modern Premier League, this generation’s answer to the rivalry between Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger; again, Klopp holds the upper hand, having won 10 and lost eight of these often rumbustious clashes.

Familiarity, perhaps, should mean games with Manchester City are easier to prepare for but Klopp gave one of those telling sighs on Friday about the challenge of keeping pace with his great rival. It is, he explained, the biggest challenge in football.

‘We all learn from other people and most of the time we only have our own brain available,’ said Klopp. ‘But if you have eyes, you’d better watch what other people can do and take it. I think that is legal. Pep had a super team that time at Bayern but this (City team) are better.

‘At Bayern, it was a super team with all those guys like (Bastian) Schweinsteiger. But Pep is now seven years at City, has a core group together, and adds quality players to it. It is a super power.

‘It is not to compare, really. It is possession-based football but Pep