Let us go back to Friday lunchtime and the spark for the latest instalment of this increasingly festering rivalry between Manchester City and Liverpool.
Jurgen Klopp had finished the broadcast section of his press conference and had moved on to taking questions from newspapers. With so many demands on his time, Liverpool's manager could only speak for six minutes and 30 seconds.
First came an enquiry about Virgil van Dijk, the next was centred on Darwin Nunez. Finally, Klopp was asked the following question: 'When you signed your new contract in April, you said City wouldn't stop developing — what do you do to keep pace?