Liverpool lost their unbeaten record on Thursday night in an absorbing clash at the Etihad.
City were well worth the win, with Sergio Aguero and Leroy Sane popping up with crucial strikes to secure a 2-1 to draw Pep Guardiola's side within four points of their rivals.
Most people would admit that Liverpool were perhaps out fought by their counterparts, City certainly looked hungrier, as evidenced by the 13.7km ran by Bernardo Silva.
But as Liverpool supporters look for reasons why they have lost their first game of the season a rather ridiculous claim has emerged; City's grass was too long.
On The Anfield Wrap, Neil Atkinson Paul Cope and Melissa Reddy were discussing the game when Atkinson brought up the Man City pitch, arguing that Guardiola had it long in order to stop Liverpool's fast passing:
Atkinson: I could not believe the length of the Manchester City pitch. The amount to which it cut up, it looked like a pitch that had been prepared for one thing, and that was to stop fast passing.
This is a Pep Guardiola pitch that has been set up to stop fast passing. That tells the story of how Manchester City approached the game as much as anything else does.
Reddy: Absolutely, Pep spoke pre-match and post-match about how Liverpool only need split seconds to change games to tear you to shreds, that Liverpool's transition is one of the scariest things in world football. Obviously that's the element they wanted to kill and control as much as they could, and the grass was one of the ways that they thought they could do that."
Atkinson: Let's be honest, Pep Guardiola works a lot on shape, where his team need to be, how he cuts the pitch up into zones. But I doubt he's probably planned to deal with an attacking opposition as much as he must have done for that one.
Their shape is great throughout, it's important to say that and praise that. Their work those players have done, they've put everything into that. But I thought they didn't look like Pep Guardiola's super-soldiers like the autumn of 2017.
Reddy: It's funny because you see the fallout of these games and people focus on the negatives, but I thought a huge positive of this was exactly that. We are so good that we forced Pep Guardiola who will not compromise on his football, to compromise on everything because he knows you've got no choice.
We ArE sO gOoD tHaT wE fOrCeD PeP GuArDiOla To LeT tHe GrAsS gRoW pic.twitter.com/WNfxmGjRMK
— Kap (@twosilvas) January 5, 2019
The video of the entire podcast seems to have been taken down since their claims were widely ridiculed online, which probably suggests that they have since seen the error of their ways.
