NIALL QUINN: Strutting Guardiola steals the show in Manchester as Mourinho throws players under the bus

Who was the real winner of the Manchester derby? The best manager in the world and some secrets about Shamrock Rovers.

by Niall Quinn, who joins JOE for a weekly column around the start of the 2016/2017 Premier League season.

The Champions League properly starts this week and suddenly, for last season’s top four Premier League clubs, it seems like everything which has happened since mid-August was really just a clearing of their throats. Now is the time to hit all the right notes.

Of those who start their campaigns over the next two weeks you would imagine that Leicester and Spurs will be extremely happy to get through to the group stages. Anything else will be a bonus.

Arsenal’s spending patterns haven’t made a convincing case for them dominating the continent.   Manchester City, who kick off against Borussia Monchengladbach tomorrow night, might be a different story.

City’s performance on Saturday at Old Trafford wasn’t perfect for ninety minutes, but there were times when you wondered how Pep Guardiola had brought such changes to a group of players whom he hasn’t been working with for more than two months.

They were quick, confident, expressive and even without Aguero there were times when they just sliced United open. Guardiola’s team deserved their win, but his presence on the sideline also overshadowed Jose Mourinho on a day when onlookers might have been expecting Jose to strut like a peacock.

Guardiola was in constant contact with his players, micromanaging the game.  You could see that these guys who have been playing football all their lives suddenly find themselves starting out on a tough and intensive post graduate course where they are going to have to learn a lot of new stuff.

I wouldn’t exactly say that Mourinho threw his men under the bus with his post match comments that included, ‘sometimes players disappoint managers,’ but he certainly gave a couple of them a bit of a shove out into the bus lane.

If there’s frank talking planned at the training ground this week Mourinho might begin by explaining how he managed to put such a subdued looking team out and why it took him so long to figure out how to deal with David Silva and De Bruyne.

United had their moments in the second half when they changed the midfield system but it was an afternoon when Guardiola responded quicker to every tactical change.

Mourinho, for all his showmanship and managerial genius, must have been left with the wise old saying “be careful what you wish for” ringing through his mind?

After the meltdown at Chelsea last season Jose disappeared for a little while and re-emerged to snatch the job that they said he had always dreamed of. And he seemed to decide that if he was going to fail he was going to fail big. He went out and bought Zlatan and Pogba and flaunted them like a man smoking two big cigars at once.

On Saturday though the harsh reality of life at Manchester United must have sunk in. During the game the TV cameras flicked up to the stands occasionally to show us what Alex Ferguson’s expression was saying. At best it wasn’t really saying very much but his presence at Old Trafford is so massive and his legacy is so great Mourinho must feel as if he has been put on probation by God himself.

And people would have been quick afterwards to remember Fergie’s traditional post match demeanour. It’s widely said that if you walked past a defeated Manchester United dressing room after matches down the years you could hear him inside mow lads down with words that sounded like they came from a machine gun, not a hair dryer.

But then, he would always come out and talk to the cameras and the newspapers to defend his men to the hilt. Doing anything else is not the Manchester United way.

Pep Guardiola on the other hand reminded me of an early experience I had when I played in a derby for Howard Kendall at Manchester City. It would be fair to say I stank the place out this day.

In my defence when you are six foot five and stuff isn’t coming off it does look bad, but even allowing for that I knew I’d had a pretty bad day.

Howard Kendall went into the press room though and told the scribes that my off-the-ball work rate had been a shining example to the other players and if we had ten more Niall Quinn’s he’d be the happiest manager in England. The media bought it and instead of getting across the board four out of ten marks in the papers the next day I got a few sevens.

I always admired Howard Kendall from the time he signed me but after that I hung on his every word. He couldn’t have found himself a more loyal follower if he had gone down to the dog rescue service. I’d run my legs to stumps for him.

I thought of that day when Pep Guardiola announced that Claudio Bravo’s nervy performance was one of the best he had ever scene. Everybody knows that Pep must have seen a bit more football than that and basically he was talking through his hat but Bravo will have loved him for it. That was the entire point.

And the race to be crowned the next Special One has hardly reached the first bend yet, but the field is beginning to stretch.

I was at Swansea versus Chelsea yesterday and again I thought of Mourinho. He will have been bruised by all the Pep 2 Jose 1  style headlines on Sunday morning and he will also be acutely conscious of what Antonio Conte is doing at Chelsea.

Conte is great value. For ninety minutes it is like all the energy of the game is being channelled through his body in the form of electric shocks. He makes Jurgen Klopp look like he has bad arthritis.

He also seems to have given this Chelsea team new energy and new focus.  They were unlucky with a bad refereeing decision for the second of Swansea’s goals but generally when they were good they were very very good.

When he landed the Chelsea job I read a quote from Italian legend Alessandro Costacurta where he said that for him, the coach was the most important thing in football and that Conte was “the best coach in the world.”

I was sceptical but everything I have seen and read about him since has been in line with such high praise.

Jose will be looking around him this week as Manchester United get themselves ready for the drudgery of the Europa League. A good competition but not one that Mourinho or Manchester United or Pogba and Zlatan will be getting too excited about.

City will keep learning and keep getting better under their eminent Professor. Chelsea, like Leicester last year, will take advantage of their blank European calendar and experience the jolt of energy a team gets when the electricity flows back out of a great manager.

It was one fascinating weekend in the white heat of the Premier League.  On the crowded Mount Rushmore of current managerial greats, Jose, Jurgen, Pep , Antonio and Arsene, it is only Jose who looks to be perspiring.

–LEAGUE OF IRELAND TALES–

There were more than a few eyebrows raised when Cork City came up to Tallaght last Friday night and saw off Shamrock Rovers with a five goal spanking.

I grew up with a liking for Rovers but was generally confused about the whole situation regarding soccer in Cork. In my time they’ve had Cork FC, Cork City in various editions, Cork United, Cork Athletic, Cork Bohemians, Cork Celtic, Cork Hibs, Cork Albert and then Cork Alberts.

They must really love their commit-eees down in Cork and that list represents a lot of meetings and crises. They were probably only a couple of committee meetings short of having Atletico Cork. And after their demolition of Rovers, maybe Cork Friday could be reserved for future use?.

That said club legend John Caulfield is proving to be as good a manager as he was a player and winning an FAI Cup Quarter-Final in such fashion will be remembered right up with the best of Cork’s proud past.

My own connection with Shamrock Rovers has been a secret history for many years and I have one or two things I should get off my chest about that relationship.

Firstly I am partly responsible for Glenmalure Park – aka Milltown, having to be sold. Enough time has passed now that I can say that publicly.

When we were kids and Johnny Giles was starting the ‘70’s revolution’ at Rovers the club had a fine winger called Larry Murray. I blame him to begin with.

Larry lived across the road from me and he drove a bread van to supplement his Rovers salary. Or was it the opposite?

On match days when Rovers were in Milltown he would pile a load of us Perrystown urchins into the back of the bread van and drive through the players entrance smuggling the lot of us in for free. I don’t know how much revenue we deprived the Kilcoyne family of but it was much appreciated at our end.

Then a couple of years later there was new manager Jim McLaughlin and his assistant Noel King trying to sign me as a Rovers professional in the days leading up to me joining Arsenal.  “We’ll split the transfer fee,” he told my mother in our front room, “that way your son gets a few more bob and Rovers can carry on producing talented youngsters.”

That I had never played for Rovers or that Arsenal didn’t want me bad enough to pay a fee was lost on them so I dodged increasing the Kilcoyne cash till a second time. No hard feelings I hope?

Strangely enough Rovers had another winger in those days, a guy who had followed Johnny Giles across from West Brom when Johnny took over at Milltown. Stevie Lynex brought more glamour to a really good team but better than that, he became pals with Larry Murray and the pair of them would regularly play kick about games with us kids on the street. You can’t imagine the excitement.

In due course when I had just broken into the Arsenal team under Don Howe, one of my first games was against Leicester City at Filbert Street. Stevie Lynex was back in England and now playing for Leicester.

I had grown about two feet taller and sported longer hair since he last saw me and of course he didn’t recognise me at first. But I think when he saw a few examples of my trademark third touch the penny began to drop.

He was a nice guy and he was loved at Leicester.  He was the wide man who fed a lot of ball to Gary Lineker and Alan Smith at the time. Gary went on to become one of the great legends of the game and Alan replaced a tremendously promising young striker with an improving third touch at Arsenal.  It’s a small world!

Second confession: As much as I liked Rovers, Larry Murray and the excitement of Milltown, my Tipperary background meant that I was possessed by some sort of Premier county ghost which no exorcist could ever drive out of me.

On the famous day when newly elected minnows, Thurles Town, humbled the mighty Rovers at Milltown sending shockwaves through world football, I switched sides and was cheering for “The Town”.

I had a right to. I had done my time watching Thurles play at the dog track on our weekend visits to the grandparents. My Dad would let me wander off to their matches so long as I didn’t tell any of the relatives that I had been to a soccer match. He would have been happier if I told them I had been in an opium den with geisha girls than at the dog track watching Thurles Town.

It was great fun though. Alfie Hale and Neville Steedman (who coincidentily scored the last ever goal at Milltown) were the glamour boys but in goal, as player manager, Thurles had Pat Dunne, one of the great characters of Irish football.

As a kid Pat was rejected by Manchester United for being too small but he kept on and Sir Matt Busby came back to sign him a few years later. And he won a league medal with the Busby Babes in his first season.

He also played for Everton, Plymouth Argyle and Ireland several times. His career seemed to go on forever.

He was a funny man and the stories about him got a good airing when he sadly passed away about a year ago. Once, out of boredom, he climbed up the goalpost onto his cross bar during a match and sat there until the thing suddenly collapsed. The game was delayed for thirty minutes till they figured out how to fix it.

He was a real grafter though, they say he had some sort of accident when he was a young apprentice at Everton that left him with one arm shorter than the other. Not ideal for a keeper.

But my favourite tale comes from his Plymouth days where he was once told he had to lose weight and turned up a week later for the weigh-in looking superbly trim but fraught in the face.

Oddly he weighed two pounds more than he had the week before and on closer inspection they put it down to the Victorian corset he wore hidden under his training jersey.

Rovers will bounce back of course. These things happen. Even Barca lost this weekend. But there is strange pleasure and hope in seeing non Dublin teams like Dundalk and Cork (and recently Sligo and Drogheda too) making great strides.

I remember enough from the excitement of that brief period when Thurles Town were a League of Ireland top flight club to know the potential that a team with good roots in their local  community can have.

Someday we will get the league right and when we do there will of course be room for the big big Dublin clubs to prosper again but hopefully they’ll dread certain journeys they have to make down the country just like big English teams always seem to fear Stoke on a wet Tuesday night.

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.