Looking at the game, I was forcibly reminded of small cameo I once saw on the video reports, which used to appear on Chessbase Magazine. At a Linares tournament, around the last 1990s, Anand had just lost to Kasparov, as Black in a Caro-Kann. The video showed part of the post-mortem, and at one point, Anand indicated a line he thought he should have played, which led to a very similar ending to that above - White had R+B v R+N, with pawns on both sides. Kasparov, no great loss to the Diplomatic Service, of course, just looked at Vishy in amazement, shrugged expansively, and said "But it's Fischer-Taimanov! It's just Fischer-Taimanov!", evidently a reference to the classic fourth game of the 1971 Candidates' match, where Fischer won a model ending of the same type. Anand continued to look at the board, without saying anything, whilst Kasparov went on shrugging and repeating, in an ever-more incredulous tone of voice, "It's just Fischer-Taimanov!". He was clearly dumbfounded that a player of Anand's strength could consider the black position remotely satisfactory.
The scene came back to me yesterday, when I watched Anand gradually losing to Wang. An act of lesè -majesté though it may be to say it, the truth is that throughout his career, Anand has always exhibited these very noticeable technical lapses. I have lost count of the number of quite simple endgames he has messed up over the years (two rounds earlier at Wijk, he blundered away half a point against Hou Yifan, after simplifying a winning knight ending into a K+P ending that was a stone cold draw). It is very strange that such a great player should do this sort of thing so regularly, although stalwarts of the old Soviet/Russian school, such as Mark Dvoretsky, put it down to a lack of formal chess education when young ("Every Russian schoolboy knows these endings!", etc). I am not sure if that is the problem, but something is clearly wrong, somewhere, and it is a weakness that he has never managed to shake off.
