Travelling to face a domestic rival in front of a raucous home crowd in a Champions League quarter-final.
Manchester City and Pep Guardiola have seen this before and it wasn t pretty.
Three goals in 19 minutes of Anfield carnage last season gave Liverpool a 3-0 lead over City and a vice-like grip on the tie that they would not relinquish.
A year on and Guardiola s side are locked in a Premier League title battle with the Reds, have won the EFL Cup and secured an FA Cup final place with victory over Brighton and Hove Albion at the weekend.
All the evidence suggests continued development or, at the very least, emphatic consolidation of their 2017-18 100-point haul in the top flight. Even with City stretching themselves on all fronts, surely lightning cannot strike twice?
Not ready to win the Champions League
Kevin De Bruyne has insisted the Liverpool defeat meant nothing when considering what awaits City at an expectant Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Tuesday – Different team, different year, different players, said the Belgium midfielder – but the spectre of rapid collapses in games is something that seems to play on Guardiola s mind.
After watching his team win 3-2 from 2-1 and a man down at Schalke in the previous round, the former Barcelona boss could not avert his gaze from the bigger picture.
Ederson
Sterling
Victory!
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague)
We re not ready to fight for the Champions League, but the result is good, he said.
We gifted the goals. If that happens in another stage… We are a nice team to watch, but we don t know how far we ll get.
A 7-0 demolition of Schalke in the second leg means he has the chance to find out. That was one of seven clean sheets in nine outings since the trip to Gelsenkirchen.
However, even allowing for the imperious Aymeric Laporte becoming a key figure at centre-back, suspicion of a glass jaw in a team with no other obvious weaknesses persists.
Miserly Mancunians
We re always disciplined. I don t know why people would say that defensively we re not disciplined, De Bruyne argues.
I think defensively we do well, but because we play more offensively than other teams people look at that. I think our shape is always there, our pressing is always there, so that s well done.
