Manchester United vs. Liverpool should actually be great this time

It’s Manchester United against Liverpool!

You remember how this went last time around. The game was moved to Monday evening, because drama looks better under lights. Sky Sports trailed it as “Red Monday,” an almost unforgivable oversight given that the game was literally in October and Jürgen Klopp would look really good mocked up as a submarine captain. The world trembled as Jose Mourinho returned to Anfield: the malicious genius that provoked The Slip, back with a bruised reputation and charge of Liverpool’s greatest rivals.

And it was awful.

At least, to give United their due, it was awful on purpose. Recognizing that his team were not in any kind of form or shape, Mourinho parked the bus, threw a giant fire blanket over it, covered the entire thing in cement, and then, just to be safe, threw it down an abandoned mineshaft. Liverpool, in theory one of the most irrepressible attacking forces in the league, managed three shots on target; United just the one.

Afterwards, Klopp lamented his team’s loss of patience and inability to break United’s close marking. Meanwhile Mourinho, who is not here for your entertainment and cares not for the redness of your Monday, was very pleased with himself:

“We controlled the game not just tactically but the emotion of the game. That was probably the quietest Anfield I had [seen] and I was expecting it to be the other way.”

It’s Manchester United against Liverpool! Get hyped!

As uninspiring as it was, from a United point of view it made perfect sense to go Anfield on a mission of containment. The home team were in excellent form, coming off a run of four straight wins in which they’d scored 13 goals. United, by contrast, were wobbling hard: they’d been beaten at home by Manchester City, turned over away by Watford, beaten Leicester, and then been held by Stoke.

More abstractly, Mourinho and his players hadn’t quite figured out how they were all going to work together, or even if they all liked one another. Marouane Fellaini started that evening, with Marcus Rashford and Ashley Young on the wings. Henrikh Mkhitaryan was injured and just beginning his long exile, Michael Carrick hadn’t yet been rehabilitated, and only David de Gea was performing with any consistency.

Paul Pogba played, but was still working his way back into form after his transfer and extended summer break. Meanwhile, stories about player dissatisfaction and training ground misery were starting to drip into the papers. It would have been admirable for Mourinho to get into the spirit of the occasion. It would also have been hugely dangerous and might, if it had gone wrong, have been hugely destructive.

Now, though, United are coming off a run of nine straight wins. Some have been glittering and thrilling, while others have suggested that United are regaining that baseline of competent superiority that’s been lacking since Alex Ferguson departed. The goals are coming, too: it’s been two and half months since United failed to score, and eight games since they failed to score twice.

As for the players, the preferred first XI has started to settle, those on the bench are contributing, and the vast majority of the squad have responded positively to the new regime. Almost everybody has improved to some extent, Pogba’s started to stroke the ball around with bewitching, beautiful arrogance, and Mkhitaryan’s finally claimed the first team place for which he was bought. Even Phil Jones has remembered that he’s supposed to be a central defender, not a punchline.

Some of this was just a question of familiarity. All managers, even special ones, need time to get their message across; all players, even stupidly expensive and richly talented ones, need time to adjust and settle. What’s been interesting, though, is that as United have come into themselves over the last few months, so Mourinho, belying his pragmatic reputation, has started making noises about style. After United dismissed West Ham in the League Cup, for example, he said this:

“One of the things I proposed to myself was to come to a club like Manchester United and play the kind of football that people want. It’s Man U tradition. I’m really happy with that. ... I’ve never had a team with so much possession, so much creation, so many chances, but I never had a team with so many draws. I want this beautiful team to win more matches. We need to score more goals like this. Playing beautiful attacking football — that is something the fans like — but we need results. So goals plus performance means the real happiness.”

This might just be PR, of course; a canny angle from a manager who knows that plenty of United fans had (and still have) doubts about his way of playing football. But nevertheless, it amounts to a statement of intent. An undertaking, of sorts. And one of the implications of such an undertaking is that it doesn’t just hold for the games against the mid- and lower-table teams. It would be a surprise if United abandoned control completely. But it would be a disappointment if they went for nothing else.

Which, in turn, will probably suit Liverpool. The situations are essentially reversed for this rematch, as it’s Liverpool that come into the game with questions over their first XI and their form. Sadio Mane is at the Africa Cup of Nations, while Jordan Henderson, Joel Matip and Philippe Coutinho are short of full fitness. And this game follows a loss to Southampton and draws with Sunderland and (after much rotation) Plymouth Argyle.

Still, it’s hard to imagine the visitors shutting the game down. This is a team built to press and to attack, in accordance with their manager’s ideas and principles, but this is also a team with a leaky defense, with only a coin flip separating two vulnerable goalkeepers.

Predicting entertainment is always a foolish thing to do, and meetings between these two clubs are often a bit underwhelming. Still, since they last met, United’s manager has found himself a team that is well capable of having a go, and more or less talked himself into a position where he has to let them.

Meanwhile Liverpool have established themselves an identity that more or less requires them to have a go back. Things should be more fun this time around, and not just because they could hardly be less.