Master of detail has lost his Champions League touch

And fade to blue. Two billion pounds, 10 years and an entire Gulf state marketing plan in the making, in the end Manchester City’s best shot so far at becoming the champions of Europe was extinguished in half an hour of tailspin at Anfield and the reverberations from two minutes of self-immolating fury from Pep Guardiola at the Etihad .

Guardiola was a little hoarse, a little overwrought at the end of this decelerating 2-1 defeat. He insisted he had not insulted the referee Antonio Mateu Lahoz in the moments before he was sent off at half-time for remonstrating in an aggressively graceless manner.

But for a master of detail, a man so obsessed he spends sleepless nights pondering the precise geometry of the defensive line, so caught up with marginal gains he even urged his players to eat a tofu turkey substitute called Tofurkey at Christmas, it seemed a laughably avoidable piece of self-harm.

It would of course be wrong to dwell on Guardiola's red card as a turning point in a tie that saw Liverpool deserved winners, all voracious attacking fire and lightning transitions through midfield.

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But for City the sight of Guardiola sat looking mournful high in the stands through the second half seemed to fit the pattern of a difficult two weeks during which the architect of this brilliant team has also made himself the central figure in their most bruising seasonal low.

That red card even came at City’s best moment in this tie, at the end of a thrilling first half that had Guardiola’s team gliding through that high-spec automatic gearbox, 1-0 up in a game they could have been winning by at least one goal more.

Guardiola did have a valid point. With 42 minutes gone Leroy Sané had bundled the ball into the net, only for the goal to be disallowed incorrectly, for offside. At which point, enter Pep. Or rather, exit.

Guardiola often sails close to the edge of his emotions, appearing at times to be unaware the edge even exists in the first place. From the start at the Etihad he was out pacing his chalk rectangle, the hood of his tight black sweatshirt bobbing with every swirl of the arms. As Gabriel Jesus’s opening goal hit the net after two minutes Guardiola could be seen pointing six different sets of instructions towards his bench, all the while unable to stop his fist coming loose and pumping at his side, like a man directing three lanes of traffic while also yanking the choke on his petrol mower.

City had fielded a team to fly forward, with five attacking midfielders behind Jesus with Raheem Sterling and Sané de facto wing-backs. This was Pep-ball turned up to 11, Pep unloading the entire clip in his splurge gun right from the off, that thrilling dream of defensive control by all-out attack.

And for a while City were so good, so smooth, so dominant you began to wonder. Bernardo Silva was beautifully cool and cute on the ball. Sterling drove hard at Liverpool's defence.

With half an hour gone Mohamed Salah had made three passes and touched the ball eight times. City had made 200 passes to Liverpool's 58. But then, we know about this stuff. The road to victory is paved with laughably lop-sided statistics but then so was each of City's three defeats in the last week, those moments were the possession becomes a heavy, migrainous thing, the passes start to drag and wear away like a dripping kitchen tap.

Ten minutes after the restart, with City’s momentum stilled, Salah scored, a lovely little dink that bulged the City net like the most elegant of knives through the heart. Roberto Firmino’s winner reflected Liverpool’s own growing sense of ease.

What seems clear is that this competition has got away from Guardiola. Winning it is, of course, dizzyingly hard but it is now seven years since Guardiola, the super-coach, made it past the semi-finals, the same year his peak-Pep Barcelona produced the finest club display of the modern age, tickling Manchester United to death with one hand at Wembley, while also bludgeoning them into submission with that refined straight left.

Since then Guardiola's record is ordinary, with 13 wins in 30 knockout games across three financially incontinent superclubs. In semi-finals his teams have shipped 16 goals in eight matches. There have been tactical mistakes against Real Madrid, Barcelona and Liverpool in the first leg of this tie, where Guardiola dropped the attacking revs , made this team less not more of itself at just the wrong moment.

We have to be perfect, Guardiola kept on saying in the buildup, despite the creeping suspicion that being perfect, aiming each time for the ideal realisation of pure, unfettered Pep-ball might be part of the problem.

This is his vice, the desire to play always to those principles rather than hedging the details and killing the game when killing the game may actually be quite a good idea.

Hence the brittleness against high-class opponents with plans and weapons of their own, canny enough to hurl a wrench into the fine-tuned circuitry.

Guardiola talked afterwards about fine details and one-off results but he is too involved not to see there is a pattern here too.

City will be back, and no doubt stronger next year. Quite how Guardiola will respond to another oddly familiar setback at an oddly familiar stage is a fascinating prospect.

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