Watching Jérémy Doku repeatedly torch Liverpool’s defence, I thought back to the first time I had seen him play, which was in the flesh, at Tallaght Stadium, Co Dublin, in the Under-17 European Championships in May 2019.
Maybe there was some gold in my notes from the day, some record of the impression made by Belgium’s young phenom when I first looked upon him with fresh eyes.
It turned out that my single note on Doku was the broadly accurate, if underwhelming: “Jeremy Doku a decent player.”
Six-and-a-half years on, Doku is the same, only more so. Conor Bradley stood up to him about as well as anyone could – certainly better than Trent Alexander-Arnold managed in the same fixture last season when Doku dribbled past him a Premier League record 12 times.
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But with Doku in this form you can’t keep him out for long. You can try doubling-up – but when Ibrahima Konate came over to help Bradley he concocted a bungle that let in Doku to win a penalty.
There was another moment when Doku, from a standing start, skipped between Bradley and Ryan Gravenberch. He finished the game with seven successful dribbles, but it felt like he had beaten more.
In terms of dribbling, he’s in a category that includes only him and Barcelona’s Lamine Yamal. What has set Yamal apart is his consistent ability to find the finish or the telling final pass after he has made space with the dribble, but against Liverpool Doku produced a Yamal-style curling finish to score the third and best goal of his team’s emphatic win.
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In Pep Guardiola’s 1,000th game, Doku’s display of individual brilliance was a riposte to those critics who suggest that the coach’s positional system of play – imitated for years now by most of the teams in the world – has suffocated individual creativity.
Jack Grealish is often held up as an example of the brilliant individual crushed by the totalising demands of the system and it’s true that in four years at Manchester City Grealish never produced a performance comparable to Doku against Liverpool. But come to think of it, neither did any of City’s other wingers. Doku may be the rare case of a free spirit the system cannot tame.
This match had promised to be a throwback occasion between two teams that have refused to go with the muscular trends that have defined this Premier League season. The most consistent thing about Liverpool in 2025-2026 has been the sound of Arne Slot bleating about their opponents playing direct football.
Slot had even claimed that Liverpool had beaten Eintracht Frankfurt, Aston Villa and Real Madrid not because they had made any particular improvements or adjustments, but because the opponents had obligingly kept the ball on the ground.
That raised the question of whether Guardiola would play his usual game, or whether he would adjust to attack Liverpool’s declared weaknesses. There was a very attacking look to the line-up he selected, with four very offensive-minded players behind Erling Haaland and Nico González anchoring the midfield alone.
But when the game kicked off it was clear that Guardiola was, if anything, doubling down on his principles. If Tony Pulis thinks the important parts of the pitch are at either end then Guardiola has always been clear that he wants to dominate the centre, and five City players swarmed the middle of the pitch.
For City’s first goal they ignored several opportunities to clear their lines, preferring to work their way past the Liverpool press with a web of intricate passes in their left-back zone, before sweeping the ball out to the vast open spaces on the far side. The eventual finish – a deep cross headed in by the huge number nine – was a nod to current fashions, but the build-up had been classic Guardiola.
Liverpool thought they had scored a 2025-style equaliser when Virgil van Dijk headed in a corner, but it was disallowed after the VAR decided that Andy Robertson had interfered with Gianluigi Donnarumma’s ability to save the shot from an offside position, even though Donnarumma had seen the ball all the way and was already diving for it before it went past Robertson.
There is little point recounting all the recent occasions when VAR has seen the same situation and come to the opposite conclusion. Suffice it to say that it seems arbitrary that a goal should be disallowed for a player ducking under a ball in a season where so many set-piece goals are allowed despite direct fouls on the goalkeeper. Donnarumma was on the other end of it last week, when Bournemouth’s David Brooks yanked his arm as he tried to jump for a corner.
Aggrieved as they might feel by the decision, Liverpool never looked like a team that seriously believed in the comeback. They have now lost 15 matches in 2025: two more than Jim Ratcliffe’s chaotic Manchester United.
Slot suggested they had improved markedly in the second half, but the one time they carved out a clear chance, Cody Gakpo blazed over an open goal.
The saddest comparison was that between Doku and Mohamed Salah, who failed to beat his man all game and indeed has completed just seven successful dribbles in 11 league games since August, the same number Doku managed in this single match.
As usual, the pundits savaged Florian Wirtz for another wispy performance. The German must envy Alexander Isak, the Premier League record signing who can sit on the bench all game and avoid criticism because he’s made so little impact that everyone has forgotten he exists. Liverpool’s title has already slipped away, but Isak looks nailed-on for the flop-of-the-season award.
In the end it was a huge result for City on a weekend when Arsenal unexpectedly dropped points at Sunderland. To chase down Mikel Arteta’s formidable squad with this young and free-scoring team, and in so doing to strike another blow for his vision of the game against the corners-and-duels style perfected by Arsenal, this would rank as one of Guardiola’s sweetest achievements.
