Its the game the entire football planet wants to watch.
Liverpool v Manchester City is always The One after their titanic clashes of recent years.
But this one, at midnight on Sunday in Malaysia, feels very different just like their form.
Liverpools is stunningly smooth with 16 wins and a draw out of 18 under new boss Arne Slot.
They top both the English Premier League and Europes Champions League tables.
City have five defeats in a row with one draw that felt worse than a defeat.
Theyve not won at all in November.
But even that doesnt begin to tell the sorry story.
Not only do City have 115 charges hanging over them, they now seem to be victims of a disease thought to have been eradicated.
Like TB and whooping cough, Cityitis appears to be making a comeback.
Before the Abu Dhabi takeover, City were better known for their cock-ups than their cups.
It was when Typical City and It can only happen to City were time-honoured prefixes.
Back then, surrendering a three-goal lead with 15 minutes to go was par for the course.
When it happened against Feyenoord on Tuesday, the crowd could not believe what they were seeing.
Its the first time such a collapse has happened in Champions League history.
The shock is still reverberating among many, but older fans recognised the symptoms.
Although long forgotten, they were unmistakable: signs of a collective meltdown on the field.
Attackers missing chances, midfield over-run, defenders committing harikiri. And the manager is self-harming!
Pep Guardiolas has made the headlines, but it underlines the pressure hes feeling.
Perhaps intensified by having committed to stay on for two more years.
Yet it had all looked so comfortable when Erling Haaland had slid home the third.
It felt like the win needed to stop the rot and restore confidence for the trip to Anfield.
And, to be fair, City played quite well. Even the much-maligned Ilkay Gundogan did and Haaland got his goal.
Only for Josko Gvardiol to have another nightmare. At fault for two of the four Spurs goals at the weekend, the Croat repeated the trick this week.
He looked a giant at the 2022 World Cup until Lionel Messi turned him inside out, but hes still a good player.
Hes done well at City, too, adding goals to his game, but lately hes been a liability. Theres a thin line between brilliant and brittle.
Compounding Citys misery on the same night, Julian Alvarez was starring again for Atletico Madrid.
Of all the players Pep has allowed to leave Leroy Sane, Raheem Sterling, Riyad Mahrez, Cole Palmer, Aymeric Laporte, Ferran Torres, Brahim Diaz the young Argentine was probably the best.
He played more minutes for City than anyone last season and is versatile enough to have deputised for both Haaland and Kevin de Bruyne.
City got 81million for him but theyd give more than that to have him back now.
Pep likes a small squad but the current one is way too small for the rigours of the modern game.
Injuries especially Rodris have done badly for him. Without Rodri, Citys loss rate jumped from 6% per cent to 37% earning them the title of biggest one-man team.
Put another way, theyve gone from four-times-in-a-row EPL champions to struggling to make it through in the Champions League.
They look like a team that wonders what has hit them and it wont be easy for Pep to right the ship.
It could be his greatest test in management.
They have not become bad players overnight and have shown glimpses of their best even on Tuesday.
Fragile is how Pep described them and theyll need careful handling, but Anfield is not the place for rehab.
The latest loss will make it that much harder to go there, especially after Liverpool underlined their credentials as the best team in Europe with a 2-0 win over Real Madrid.
City should forget any hopes the Reds might be complacent: after being pipped narrowly to the title so many times, the home side will be eager to show who is top dog now.
Everyone at Anfield would love to take the moneybags men from Manchester down a peg or two.
But the sight of Ibrahima Konate and Conor Bradley being helped off late on might mean changes in defence.
Its an awful long time since the form of the two clubs has been so far apart all the way back to the cock-up days in fact.
We thought it had been wiped out by billions of Gulf oil money.
An entire generation has grown up knowing only superstar players and glittering trophies. This will be hard to take.
Still, Sunday night remains a fascinating clash. A win for Liverpool would put them 11 points clear of City, but the race would still not be over: Liverpool will have a fade at some point.
And Arsenal are coming back strongly now that Martin Odegaard is back.
And what about a win for City?
It would be a major shock after recent events.
But if Haaland had taken early chances against both Spurs and Feyenoord, those matches could have been very different.
City are due a break but theyve got to create one themselves.
Peps usual remedy is to pass the ball around something City do better than anyone.
Then if they can score, they must hold the lead and hope the old City mojo will somehow reemerge.
There would be no better place to pull off a shock than Anfield. It could be the best confidence booster City could ask for.
Its unlikely, but cannot be ruled out.
Nor can another 7-0 thrashing of the kind United copped a couple of seasons ago. With more Mo Salah magic.
Either way, as we used to say: It could only happen to City.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.