Liverpool and Manchester United. Red Monday.
We aren’t even a third of the way through the season, and it feels as if we aren’t leaving enough space for bigger hype when things get really serious in the New Year.
I blame the managers. Of course. That’s the first thing that they taught me at Football Chairman school. Blame the managers. Red Monday is as much about Klopp and Mourinho as it is about two clubs whose shared history sometimes looks too big a fit for either of them.
Tonight is when they get their first meaningful progress reports of the season.
Liverpool, if they win by three clear goals, can go top of the Premier League tonight, which means that the Klopp household will be a lot happier with the report which drops through their letterbox. Jurgen is a bright boy who gets on well with those around him and learns quickly.
If United lose they are bogged down in eighth place with Palace, Watford and Bournemouth snapping at their heels, just two points behind. If that happens Mourinho’s report will have to include phrases like “Jose must learn to pay attention to his past mistakes” and “Jose should focus more on his homework and not so much on the referee.”
Both men are good fits for their current jobs.
Jurgen Klopp wound up in Liverpool because it is a club and a city which would give him the chance to do what he is good at.
At Dortmund he took over a dowdy organisation who had been through three managers in a year. He improved players through good coaching and hard work. He had a sincere connection to the people who paid to watch his side.
He enjoyed not being Bayern Munich manager more than he would have enjoyed being Bayern manager.
It is hard to imagine him being interested in managing a club like Bayern or Manchester United where every transfer has to be a statement, every quote has to be a headline and every defeat is a catastrophe.
Liverpool, since they last won a title, have tried waking up all the ghosts in the old bootroom. No luck. They have looked to France with Houllier and to Spain with Rafa and to the X Factor with a young and upcoming Brendan Rogers but, despite a few nice sunrises, it always went dark again.
Klopp seems to be precisely the right man at the right time. He had hardly seen a wet day at Anfield before the club extended his contract to keep him there until 2022. They made the right move.
Gerard Houllier had brought the culture of French football with him to Anfield. Rafa Benitez brought a chunk of Spain with him. Klopp, however, realised that Liverpool though is always Liverpool.
The German’s way has been to absorb himself into that, rather than to make the club absorb itself into Jurgen Klopp, his personality and his beliefs. He is embedded now and he pays enough respect to history to keep a very sentimental city happy.
Now enough of his own ethic is starting to seep onto the field to make that sentimental city look to the future with hope and patience.
And then you have Jose.
Down the road Jose Mourinho wanted the Manchester United job because of their past and his sense that he was the man, maybe the only man, big enough to handle all that.
You have to admire the bravado and showmanship the Portuguese brings with him anywhere he goes.
He strides toward the challenges that other managers would be wary of. He buys big and fearlessly. He gets in people’s heads, he gets on people’s nerves and when he gets knocked down he gets up again.
At United he is compulsive viewing. It isn’t easy for anybody to go to Old Trafford and to patrol the touchline with Alex Ferguson watching from the stand. That run of 22 Fergie-led seasons in the top three is too recent in the memory at Old Trafford for there to be much room for failure.
David Moyes found that out the hard way. He wanted to change too much, too soon and didn’t have the flamboyant personality or the results to pull it off.
Louis van Gaal ended up with some of the bickering we associate with Dutch sides but not the style.
Jose hasn’t turned United into a Portuguese club, he has made them a Mourinho club. Or he is in the process of doing so. If he pulls it off he will own the place. If he fails he will move on.
He has been around the block at enough big clubs not to be surprised at the media obsession with the Wayne Rooney situation. I don’t believe that Jose dug a hole for himself when he said early on that he didn’t see Rooney as a midfielder. I think he was right.
Wayne Rooney is 30 now – he turns 31 a week after the Liverpool game.
He started playing in the Premier League in 2002 and made his debut for England in 2003. In modern football that is an epic career. Already. He has been one of the great strikers of the Premier League era and even if he has lost a little bit of pace he has forgotten more about the cunning art of being a striker than most young players can ever hope to learn.
He is at that stage where he needs the time to adjust his style to accommodate the loss of explosive place, but keep that brilliant positioning and finishing in play. He is in a very competitive situation for a place up front in the current United set up. Zlatan is Mourinho’s boy, Marcus Rashford just keeps scoring and in these early days Jose is under a lot of scrutiny.
Wayne Rooney will know though that his manager is a character who has never backed off a big decision.
If he didn’t want Wayne Rooney at Old Trafford, Rooney would be somewhere else by now. Wayne has also been around the block long enough to know that in football things change very quickly. An injury or a suspension to somebody else or, better still, a really convincing cameo as a sub can shift the pecking order at any time.
As a midfielder, Rooney is what people in the game refer to as a crab. He moves things sideways. He doesn’t give you the burst of acceleration or the cutting forward pass that cuts half the opposing team out of the picture in a stroke.
A lot of good players have made great careers out of being crabs, but being a crab is not in Wayne Rooney’s nature. He is a scorpion.
He still has that sting.
The great antidote for any striker is to score a goal or two and Wayne Rooney knows that when he hits the net a couple of times this uncertain period of his career will be over with.
Red Monday is exciting, maybe big enough to justify its billing as an event in itself, but it’s not about who will win the league this year. It is about the characters at the centre of the drama.
Klopp will know that unlike most of the years that Liverpool have been away from the top of the table, beating United is no longer the next best thing to silverware.
Mourinho will know that Eric Cantona was right when he said that the seagulls follow the trawler because they think there will be sardines. Nobody gives more sardines to the media seagulls then Jose Mourinho does. When he puts together any sort of a good run, the papers will be filled again with testimonies to his genius.
And Wayne Rooney knows that what goes around comes around. He will bide his time.
Those storylines are why I’ll be tuning into the soap opera, Red Monday.
Niall Quinn on why Ireland don’t have the players to be swashbuckling
I was at St Mary’s yesterday watching Southampton deal comfortably with the challenge of Burnley.
Another season, another manager, another clutch of players sold on and Southampton keep doing what they do best.
Playing attractive open football as a club whose ethos is bigger than any particular personality.
I enjoyed watching them but one thing which nagged away at my brain all afternoon was the situation of the Irish players on and off the field.
Stephen Ward and Jeff Hendrick both started for Burnley and could do very little to stop their team being overrun.
At the end of the afternoon, Burnley were a point above the relegation zone and looking like a side that would be happy enough to still be a point away from disaster come next May. Their second half penalty was their first goal away from home this season.
The reality that Ward and Hendrick face is shared by most of the Irish squad at the moment. Shane Long was on the bench for Southampton yesterday. He saw Charlie Austin score his sixth and seventh of the season and Nathan Redmond net a really good goal. Meanwhile, Tadic provided a constant attacking threat.
It’s going to be a struggle for Shane to get a long run as first choice.
Of the remainder of the Irish team which started against Moldova, Darren Randolph wasn’t in the team or on the bench for West Ham and our two centre halves, Clark and Duffy, were playing football in the Championship. The same counts for Wes Hoolahan, whose goal for Norwich was the bright spot of the weekend in Irish terms.
Wes is 34 now, and hopefully he continues lighting up the the road to Russia but if we get there we certainly can’t assume that he will be a central figure.
Glenn Whelan played 90 minutes for Stoke but Jon Walters got just a quarter of an hour as a sub.
James McCarthy seemed to be the casualty of a spat between Ronald Koeman and Martin O’Neill and started on the bench, but at least he played the last half hour or so. Seamus Coleman just keeps rolling on for Everton. James McClean put in his usual good shift for West Brom.
The point is that I agree with the sentiments coming out of the Irish camp that we need to readjust our view of things.
We don’t have players working week in and week out at a club level which gives us the right to expect success every time they put on a green jersey.
We have the ingredients for beer, not fine wines. And that’s ok with me.
Perhaps we have been spoiled by the good days we had under Jack Charlton.
Jack had a team which included a lot of players at the top of the English game. We had good times, great times, but even still a section of the home constituency denounced Jack for introducing ‘caveman’ football. It worked, though. That was the point.
Martin O’Neill has produced a team which is a long way from the caveman tag, but which certainly isn’t swashbuckling.
We don’t have the players to be swashbuckling.
The reality is that qualifying for major tournaments is always going to involve punching above our weight. And when we qualify and we get lovely days like the Italy game this summer it shouldn’t mean that we lose the run of ourselves.
This Irish team and probably all Irish teams for a long time to come have to stretch what resources they have right to the limit. It’s a business of pragmatism and the romance lies in just getting to the big occasions and hopefully giving ourselves a couple of good days off from the stresses of life when we get there.
Maybe one day we will play like the Brazilian team of 1970 or the Barcelona team of Pep.
Meanwhile, let’s give the team a little space, let’s stop complaining about style and start counting the points in the bag.
Niall Quinn is a former Arsenal, Manchester City, Sunderland and Republic of Ireland striker. He currently works as a pundit and co-commentator for Sky Sports, and also writes for Sportsvibe.
