Liverpool will be the true test of Manchester United’s post-Mourinho rehabilitation

We’re all making it up as we go along. Every football match matters exactly as much as we — collectively, largely unthinkingly — agree to pretend that it does.

A moderately distinguished Victorian man pops into a silversmith one afternoon and, as if by magic, some games become cup games. Suddenly they matter more. A bad tackle, an unjust decision, or a foul mood decides one game, and a few months later the rematch is just a touch spicier.

Or sometimes the two interested parties are so close together — geographically, culturally, spiritually — that things have to matter just a little bit more. Because, well, how could they not? Proximity plus activity creates friction.

Which brings us to Manchester United’s game against Liverpool, one of those fixtures that always matters even when it doesn’t, because it has to, because everybody agrees that it does. Two sides separated by a short stretch of motorway, by the colour of their shorts, and by an enduring spirit of mutual contempt. Two vast commercial enterprises built around two old, gnarled football clubs. Both alike in dignity, which you can take however you like.

The two only really agree in the business of trophy collection, and even there, there’s a question of preference. United have the edge domestically, 20 titles to 18, but Liverpool have five European big pots to United’s three.

That said, it’s been a while since the two teams were both challenging for the same title. On Sunday, the sides will kick off at Old Trafford separated by 14 points. This is an improvement from the 19 that separated the teams when Jose Mourinho departed, but still represents two teams having very different seasons.

Yet showings in this fixture resonate beyond the table. Bad performances here are worse than bad performances elsewhere, and good ones are better. United may not have been in the hunt for the league recently, but it was two games against Liverpool — one last season, one this — that bracketed the decline of Mourinho’s stay at the club. The first foretold his doom; or perhaps, as is often the case with prophecy, served to create it. The second sealed it.

It seems a long time ago now, but United began last season looking like a proper, decent football team. Paul Pogba was creating things, Romelu Lukaku and Anthony Martial were finishing them off. All at some pace, too. Seven games, 21 goals, 19 points. Not quite perfect, but the first chunk of a title challenge.

And then came Liverpool, at Anfield. It was, in the detail, an astoundingly boring game. United came armed with chloroform and fire blankets, utterly determined to prevent anything at all from happening. And it worked! A nil-nil draw passed through the world like sweetcorn, with nothing to digest. Job done.

Yet United never recovered from this miserable success. They lost the next game to Huddersfield, in vaguely farcical fashion, squeaked past Tottenham, and then lost to Chelsea. If this were an ancient epic, we might decide that Mourinho was punished by the gods for his cowardice, and condemned to spend the rest of his days at Old Trafford trying to make a solid defence out of tissue paper and spite.

But such prosaic football deserves more prosaic conclusions, so let’s read it instead as a statement from Mourinho. That statement being, roughly: I don’t think my team are good enough to win here, and I don’t think there’s any chance that I am wrong about that.

To get away with that, against Liverpool, you need Ferguson-levels of credit. Also you need to be able to back it up with Ferguson-levels of points accumulation in all the other games. In the absence of either, the helium went out of United’s season, and the buoyancy of those early games — goals! scored at pace! — never returned.

First the set-up, then the punchline. Fast forward to this season, and United went to Anfield again. But this time, they didn’t even have the capacity to kill the game. Liverpool’s 3-1 win wasn’t a thrashing; it was something much stronger. A dealing with. An easing past. And another statement, this time from Liverpool: We are going to compete for this title because we deserve to. You aren’t, because you don’t.

A thrashing might have been survivable, since weird things happen in football. But Liverpool’s victory was so un-weird, so obviously and clearly correct, that it became unbearable. Mourinho had completed his Liverpool-bracketed journey, from cowardice to collapse, and he was done.

Whether this weekend’s game has anything similar to say about United’s future remains to be seen. Mourinho’s successor is still under by the twin protections of “Hey, I’m just a caretaker” and “Wow, everybody hated the last guy,” which might draw a little of the sting out of any defeat. Miss a free hit, and nobody minds too much.

But it’s been a while since a group of United players really went for a Liverpool side, and even if that goes wrong — and it really, really might — it would stand as another refreshing change from what went before. And if Solskjaer and his re-energised squad manage to banjax Liverpool’s title bid, then everybody will agree that this was all extremely important, and the Norwegian will be made permanent manager by popular acclamation.