It is ninth hosting tenth but Chelsea at Liverpool is still a far-more eagerly anticipated prospect than any other mid-table fixture. The Premier League heavyweights are currently tied on 28 points and faced each other four times across all competitions last season without a winner emerging over 90 minutes.

An early start on a cold day may take some of the sting from this great rivalry, however. This is the Londoners’ first Saturday 12.30pm kick-off of the season (though the home clash with Arsenal in November was 12 noon on a Sunday). Jurgen Klopp’s men were surprisingly beaten 1-0 at Nottingham Forest in this time slot back in October, having shared a 0-0 with Everton over lunch at Goodison Park a month earlier.

This is the last league action for both clubs to assess their squads before the transfer window closes at 11pm UK time on Tuesday 31 January. Chelsea have been prime movers so far and could hand a debut to sensational new winger Mykhailo Mudryk.

• Watch Kai Havertz talk about Liverpool game

• 'I can't wait to start'

• The big match stats collection

The Blues returned to winning ways at home to Crystal Palace last Sunday, while the Reds have started 2023 by losing both Premier League games, at Brentford and Brighton. They have not kicked off a calendar year with three straight league losses since January 1953.

Klopp will also be aware the 1,000th match of his coaching career is against his toughest opponent. Six wins from 19 clashes with Chelsea is the German’s lowest success rate against any team faced 10 or more times.

Chelsea team news

Our head coach Graham Potter knows what it takes to win at Anfield – his Brighton side notched a 1-0 there in February 2021. Already buoyed by Chelsea’s solid home victory over Crystal Palace last weekend, he could welcome more players back from injury and hand out another debut.

Armando Broja, Wesley Fofana, N’Golo Kante, Edouard Mendy, Christian Pulisic, Denis Zakaria and Raheem Sterling (against his former club) will definitely miss out, while Joao Felix is suspended for the second of three matches.

But wing-backs Ben Chilwell and Reece James returned to full training on Tuesday, just in time to catch the first moves of headline-signing Mykhailo Mudryk.

The fitness-obsessed Ukrainian is the fastest recorded sprinter in this season’s Champions League (at 36.6km an hour) and in training already looks a fizzing, seat-tipping winger in the grand Chelsea tradition of Blunstone, Cooke, Nevin, Robben and Hazard.

His new coach has been rewarded recently for backing newly arrived or less-experienced players. While the thought of him attacking space at Liverpool is enticing, 59 days will have elapsed since Mudryk’s most recent action, in which he set up Shakhtar Donetsk’s opener and scored a late winner from the spot.

Sunday’s clean sheet – only the second for the Blues in 13 games – might justify retaining the slickly efficient debutant Benoit Badiashile at centre-back. The Frenchman was focused, aerially dominant and showed an excellent range of distribution with 96 per cent accuracy. Chelsea’s defence is already the fourth-best in the Premier League.

The hybrid 4-2-3-1 system with Lewis Hall attacking far more than fellow full-back Trevoh Chalobah helped accelerate the Blues’ progress from front to back, also drawing the best from Hakim Ziyech, who registered his first assist of the season. The impressive Conor Gallagher could retain his role in midfield, an area where teams have troubled the Reds in recent games.

Kai Havertz’s second goal since the World Cup means he is now our joint leading marksman. He also netted in this fixture last season and will hope to emulate Joe Cole, who scored in two successive league visits to Anfield in 2005.

Combined goals and assists all competitions 2022/23

Scouting the opposition: Liverpool

Without a clean sheet in eight successive top-flight matches, shipping three in each of the past two, Liverpool needed their 1-0 FA Cup win at Wolves on Tuesday. The two previous league performances had Jurgen Klopp apologising to fans for his underperforming team.

In the search for solutions just three players started both Liverpool’s last two games: centre-forward Cody Gakpo, midfielder Thiago Alcantara and centre-back Ibrahima Konate.

Several key players remain unavailable, including Luis Diaz, Roberto Firmino, Diogo Jota and Virgil van Dijk, though James Milner returned midweek and Klopp is hopeful Uruguay striker Darwin Nunez will be back.

Since the sale of Sadio Mane and the part the attacker played in their concerted pressing system, Mohamed Salah now plays a deeper role.

At Anfield, the Reds have scored the opening goal in four of their nine league matches. Four teams have an earlier average time for conceding the first goal than the Merseysiders’ 23 minutes. Chelsea opened the scoring in our past two Premier League matches at Anfield.

Two teams with targets beyond the title

This would have been the second meeting between the two sides this season but the game at the Bridge, originally scheduled for 18 September, was postponed as a result of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral. An option to fit the London meeting in on 10/11 January was scuppered by Liverpool’s FA Cup replay at Molineux on Tuesday.

The last occasion the two sides met for the first time in a season and both were already effectively out of the title race came in 2015 at the Bridge, a Hallowe’en night that unearthed Jurgen Klopp’s first Premier League victory with his new club.

Perennial fixtures of the top four, the Blues and the Reds still have silverware to battle for, especially as the Champions League – in which both reached the final recently – returns to our screens on Valentine’s Day next month.

While it will take an excellent and sustained run of results to earn a place among Europe’s elite next season, the pair are among the Premier League era’s foremost competitors. Chelsea are the competition’s third best all-time performers and Liverpool fourth. The Londoners have recorded 626 wins compared to the Merseysiders’ 617, averaging 1.85 points per game compared 1.83 for the Reds.

Finishing positions in Premier League era

Azpi and big five-oh-oh

Thanks to a late arrival off the bench against Crystal Palace, Azpilicueta is set to make his 500th appearance for the Blues this weekend. All five of the previous men to reach that milestone were English and four of them graduated from the club’s youth scheme – almost by definition starting their career young.

The number of matches the Spain international has accumulated since 2012 is testament to the Blues consistently going all the way in cup competitions as well as the versatile defender’s reliability under a succession of top coaches.

Azpi, whose opener in royal blue was in a 6-0 thrashing of Wolves, was a product of the Osasuna academy in Spain’s northern Navarro province and was 23 by the time he made the switch from Marseille in southern France. Now he is on course to reach the landmark figure in the third shortest time – 3,771 days – if involved at Anfield.

Fastest to 500

Frank Lampard (19 Aug 2001-6 Apr 2011) - 3,518 days
John Hollins (25 Sep 1963-19 Jan 1974) - 3,770
Peter Bonetti (2 Apr 1960-16 Jan 1971) - 3,942
Ron Harris (24 Feb 1962-10 Feb 1973) - 4,005
John Terry (28 Oct 1998-30 Apr 2011) - 4,568

World champions for a few weeks more

Keep saying it while we still can: Chelsea’s reign as champions of the world will come to an end on 11 February when the next final of the Club World Cup will be contested in Rabat, Morocco.

In the running to succeed the Blues are Real Madrid (Spain), Flamengo (Brazil), Seattle Sounders (USA), Al Ahly (Egypt), Auckland City (New Zealand), Al Hilal (Saudi Arabia), and host representatives Wydad Casablanca.

In last year’s competition Romelu Lukaku’s strike saw off Saudi side Al Hilal in the semi-final, before a Kai Havertz penalty against Palmeiras in the final made it 2-1 to the Blues, meaning we had ‘won it all’ at last.

• By club historian Rick Glanvill and club statistician Paul Dutton