Man City need Haaland patience they may not be granted by Liverpool in title race

Losing the Community Shield is easy to dismiss, but Pep Guardila has work to do after Manchester City and Erling Haaland were undone by Liverpool.

Sound the alarms and paint a red cross on the main entrance to The Etihad Stadium; Erling Haaland is a disastrous signing for Manchester City and may single-handedly crash the entire Abu Dhabi project into the sea. Liverpool will win the Premier League by 20 points, with a display of football so sparkling that Merseyside will be granted full independence from the United Kingdom.

Or, in other words, the Premier League is (almost) back, and it doesn’t feel as though much has changed, even if quite a lot actually has.

Like a lot of trophies these days, whether the Community Shield is a ‘glorified pre-season friendly’ or a piece of ‘major silverware’ does have a tendency to depend on whether you’ve won it or not.

But if we strip away the meta-meaning of such a match, the message sent from The King Power Stadium was loud and clear: on the basis of the available evidence, Liverpool look considerably better prepared for the new Premier League season than Manchester City.

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In a sense, this shouldn’t be surprising. Both of these clubs have made significant changes to their attacking structures for the new season, but have gone about it in subtly different ways. Liverpool brought Luis Diaz in at the end of the January transfer window and then strengthened further with the acquisition of Darwin Nunez, while Sadio Mane left for Bayern Munich. Evolution over revolution? Probably, and the memories of Nunez being castigated as ‘the new Andy Carroll’ after a miss in their friendly – and there was no doubt whatsoever that this match was a ‘friendly’ – against Manchester United already seem long-forgotten.

Manchester City have followed a different tack. It’s been clear all summer that they are rebuilding the way in which they attack. Not only has football’s Ivan Drago arrived from a remote log cabin in Siberia, but Gabriel Jesus and Raheem Sterling have departed for Arsenal and Chelsea respectively.

A False Nine has been replaced by Definitely A Number Nine, and it’s somewhat inevitable that changing the system in this way will take time to bed in.

And while Guardiola may not be overly concerned about this all clicking into place in the end, it is equally true that the new Premier League season…