Bernardo Silva comments could betray Man City’s unhealthy Liverpool problem

At the time of writing, there has been more than 25,000 responses, 50,000 retweets and 170,000 likes of Bernardo Silva’s tweet to Liverpool fans after Manchester City exited the Champions League.

City’s hope of winning the silverware that has eluded their decorated manager Pep Guardiola at the Etihad came to another end on Saturday night when they suffered a shock quarter-final loss to Lyon.

It means Guardiola’s side’s season will go down as a failure by their high standards after also finishing 18 points behind newly-crowned champions Liverpool in the Premier League.

City did win the League Cup for the third year running but it was telling that Silva used the words ‘disappointing’ and ‘frustration’ in his first tweet on Sunday.

His second took aim at the Reds supporters who had contacted him on Twitter when he said: “And to all Liverpool fans that have nothing else to do than to come to a Man City player account, I’m also sorry for you but for the wrong reasons…

“Pathetic…go celebrate your titles, or try to find a partner, drink a beer with a friend, read a book… So many options!”

Silva’s tweet is one of the big talking points of the latest Blood Red podcast, which suggests the Portuguese has only made the situation worse, and questions whether Silva and City need to look at their own actions.

 “There’s no secret there’s been a growing animosity between the two fan bases in recent years,” said Paul Gorst, the Liverpool ECHO’s LFC correspondent.

“It doesn’t extend to the coaching staff as we know that Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola, while not best friends, have a huge underlying respect, which there should as they are arguably the two greatest coaches around.

“But in terms of players clashing with each other, we’ve seen Joe Gomez and Raheem Sterling, and it must have hurt City badly to give Liverpool the guard of honour at the Etihad, and I think that’s where a lot of this has come from.

“If you look at the pictures and footage from that night, Bernardo Silva was the one City player very visibly not giving it a round of applause. So I think Liverpool fans have taken to Twitter on Saturday night with a little bit of glee and delight in the fact that City were dumped out by a team they should be beating, and he’s tried to fire back.

“I can only imagine the amount of tweets he’s had to see before deciding to fire back. But when you’re a multi-million pound footballer, you’re best staying off Twitter for a while, and ignoring it, because he’s only made it worse tenfold now.”

Joe Rimmer, the Liverpool ECHO’s sports audience editor, agrees that Silva would have been best keeping his head down.

And he also wonders whether Silva and his City manager Guardiola would be best keeping quiet about Klopp’s…