Every year, about this time, the weather and the fixtures calendar align to play an ironic little trick. The mellow torpor of fine spring days jars with the intensity and significance of the matches. Not at the City of Manchester Stadium on Saturday, where the apathy was real.

Stuart Pearce, the Manchester City manager, stated in his programme notes that the season was far from over, but the lazy, hazy sunshine over Eastlands made it an afternoon for Pimm’s and picnics, not passion and rhetoric. With his side safe from relegation, Pearce is looking beyond this term: he left at the final whistle on a scouting mission.

With five games to play, Liverpool are third: seven points clear of Bolton Wanderers, who are fifth, so who can blame Liverpool’s players if they are focused on facing Chelsea in the Champions League semi-finals rather than worrying about the Barclays Premiership.

Liverpool have two home matches, against Middlesbrough in two days and Wigan Athletic on Saturday, before the trip to Stamford Bridge a week on Wednesday. “Sure, we will perform better [against Chelsea] than [on Saturday],” Rafael BenÍtez, the Liverpool manager, said.

A newspaper has claimed that BenÍtez will receive a bonus of £300,000 if Liverpool finish third in the Premiership and £1 million if they are European champions. It might say something about the club’s priorities that, according to the article, the incentive of £100,000 per player for winning the Champions League is four times greater than the reward for finishing top of the Premiership.

Strengthening his side for a Premiership match having weakened it for the Champions League win over PSV Eindhoven must have been a strange feeling for BenÍtez. “They knew it was important to win this game to secure the points for the top four as soon as possible,” he said. “In the second half we needed to change things because we were not creating,” he conceded, adding that the forward runs of Dirk Kuyt and Steven Gerrard were “almost perfect”.

One attacking move from Joey Barton was less admirable. Before kick-off, the City midfield player, born in Liverpool, laid flowers in front of the away end in remembrance of the Hillsborough Disaster, which happened 18 years ago yesterday. In the second half he was lucky to receive only a yellow card for a challenge that was less a tackle than an impersonation of a man in a luge hurtling towards its target. Barton’s high two-footed lunge took the ball but was inches away from causing serious damage to Gerrard’s leg.