Liverpool v Manchester City: Community Shield – live!

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Pre-match reading

Erling Haaland is the only summer signing to start for either team. Liverpool’s record signing Darwin Nunez is on the bench, as are Fabio Carvalho, Julian Alvarez, Kalvin Phillips and Stefan Ortega Moreno.

With Alisson and Caoimhin Kelleher injured, Adrian is in goal for Liverpool.

Liverpool (4-1-2-3) Adrian; Alexander-Arnold, Matip, van Dijk, Robertson; Fabinho; Henderson, Thiago; Salah, Firmino, Diaz.

Substitutes: Davies, Gomez, Konate, Milner, Keita, Jones, Elliott, Nunez, Carvalho.

Manchester City (4-1-2-3) Ederson; Walker, Dias, Ake, Cancelo; Rodri; Bernardo, De Bruyne; Mahrez, Haaland, Grealish.Substitutes: Ortega Moreno, Phillips, Stones, Gundogan, Alvarez, Foden, Mbete, Palmer, Wilson-Esbrand.

Both teams have also sold big players this summer: Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus, Oleksandr Zinchenko, Divock Origi, Takumi Minamino – and the mighty Sadio Mane, whose departure deserved more fanfare. The coverage made it feel like just another biggish transfer, rather than the departure of an all-time great. As ever, Jurgen Klopp found the right words.

What crazy hell kinda month do you call this? For the first time, the curtain is being raised on the new English season in July. The Community Shield has been played in April (don’t ask), May (see April), August, September and October (including the last time it wasn’t played in August, back in 1958), but never before in July. Welcome to 2022-23, a feast/slog like no other, with a World Cup for a winter break and a Champions League final in the middle of June.

There’s only one way for it to start: with a meeting between the best two teams in England, perhaps the best in the world. (I appreciate Real Madrid would disagree, and their shiny, silver, 74cm, 11kg argument is a persuasive one.) The Community Shield between Liverpool and Manchester City is being played at Leicester’s King Power Stadium, because Wembley is booked for a festival tomorrow.

For reasons too boring to explain, mostly involving the FA Cup, this is only the second Community Shield involving City and Liverpool. But they have dominated English football for the last four or five years, and their rivalry is the greatest in this country since Arsenal and Manchester United saw each other out there.

Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp have set obscene standards, making 90+ points the norm rather than the exception. Now they are aiming even higher by signing classical centre-forwards. There’s nothing false about Erling Haaland and Darwin Nunez, a pair of nines who are as true as a dying man’s final words.

Evolving a great team comes with risk (see: Juan Veron and Ruud van Nistelrooy, Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack, even Ian Wright), but the main reaction to the signings of Haaland and Nunez is excitement – for the teams involved, for the Premier League and for the folk who keep goalscoring records.

If the presence of Haaland and Nunez (and Kalvin Phillips, Julian Alvarez and Fabio Carvalho) isn’t a decent selling point for an otherwise underwhelming fixture, then I don’t know what is. Today is our first chance to see them in a semi-competitive game; to compare and contrast and despair when Andy Carroll starts trending on Twitter.

Kick off 5pm.