Manchester City walked into Anfield days after being found guilty of breaching Premier League financial rules, and then they did what they do best: they won. Three-nil. Six matches unbeaten. Three points clear at the top. The scoreboard did not care about the verdict, and neither, it seemed, did the Premier League’s own sense of irony.
Jérémy Doku did the delighting. He ran at Liverpool as if the rulebook were a suggestion written in pencil, every touch carrying the faint swagger of a club that has learned the difference between being caught and being punished. The crowd came to watch a title race. What they got was a theatre piece called Innocent Until Convenient, performed with a full orchestra and a brass band of lawyers somewhere in the back row.
Let us be precise about what happened. A club was found guilty. That club then celebrated. The anthem was sung, the goals were scored, and the league table was quietly updated to reflect the one thing nobody in the building seemed to be discussing. Somewhere a compliance officer is unplugging the confetti cannon, and it is still unclear who paid for the confetti.
Liverpool, down to ten men and out of answers, simply lost. That is the lesson the league keeps asking us to accept about financial fairness: the rules apply, eventually, to someone. Just not, it appears, to the team at the top of the table on a Sunday afternoon in October.