The game is about players. This truism is uttered by plenty of managers from Harry Redknapp to Pep Guardiola, with varying degrees of conviction. Redknapp, a football man, sees his role as speaker of simple truths, a man who sighs and says ‘common sense ain’t that common’, before reminding Roman Pavlyuchenko to “facking run about”.
Pep likes to say the game is about players too, but it’s possible he utters this phrase as a calming mantra, a meditative device to remind himself there are things he can’t control, no matter how much he wants to control everything.
If Jose Mourinho believes it, he probably never believes it more acutely than when his players are letting him down.
His final game at Chelsea last December ended with him accusing his own players of betraying his work. The diligent manner with which he had approached the game was for nought once the players went on the field and started doing their thing, whatever it was.
If the game was about players at that moment, it was about players at their most wilful, a group including a few malcontents who some would hold responsible for his downfall.
He had, of course, delivered another Premier League title the year before, suggesting that the thing that made Mourinho bearable was present still.
Manchester United needed that thing, that ability to win no matter what when they went looking for another manager to take the club forward, even if the past under Alex Ferguson has so quickly become a fond and alien land. If there were more suitable candidates than Mourinho, United couldn’t take a backward step after the confirmation that Pep Guardiola was heading to Manchester City.
They needed the guarantees Mourinho was said to provide, but what are those guarantees these days? Even with the league title in 2015, some at Chelsea might wonder at the strange two years they endured under the manager who returned talking about love and left wondering how his work could be betrayed, how could love end like this? How could the red turn grey?
His appointment at United may have been inevitable, but Mourinho has not appeared to be reinvigorated by assuming what Alex Ferguson called “such high office”.
Mourinho is a diminished figure these days. He has become the Boris Johnson of football, a personality who was once viewed by a certain section of society as charismatic and amusing, a man who could be guaranteed to make them swoon. They swarmed outside his London residence to find out what he would do next, not noticing that he now represented something else entirely.
In the modern era, he represents a shrinking of ambition, a closure to all that is possible and a fearful approach to engagements with the outside world.
Mourinho has reduced football to his core principles and while those principles could allow him to win at Anfield on Monday night – as he won at Manchester City during his first season of his second spell at Chelsea – he may never look like a man who belongs in this high office.
Perhaps when Manchester United hired Mourinho in 2016, they believed they could rejuvenate the man of 2004 or 2010, a man who didn’t seem worn down by all the battles he had fought. Instead they may have hired the man of 2013-2015 and that might be enough for victory at Anfield, achieved using those key fundamentals which Mourinho increasingly falls back on.
They tell him that a lot can go wrong on a football pitch and the game is about reducing mistakes and punishing the adventure of others. If there is a vision, it is an unrelenting vision of what happens if you take too many risks.
Ferguson preached that management was about power and control, but he knew when to believe in his players, when to stand back and let them play.
On Monday evening, Mourinho may roll out his vision again. Liverpool have begun the season with verve and panache. They could go top of the table with an emphatic victory, but already the supporters feel they have a manager they can believe in.
They are a club which is always craving a spiritual connection, like a peripatetic new age practitioner who has lived in ashrams, cleansed chakras and engaged in some shamanic rituals as they keep on trying to find themselves. It is a life that involves much disappointment which is the necessary accompaniment to the hope from which they can never escape.
As a club, they are always in search of a guru, an elder who has all the answers and can make sense of life’s mysteries, like the mystery of the 27 years they have waited for a league title. In Klopp, they may have found a manager more suitable for the role than some who have been asked to be the carrier of wisdom.
Klopp recently told Gary Lineker his philosophy of football and how it should energise the crowd. “People [should] really want to see the next game. You leave the stadium and you can’t wait for the next game – that’s what football should be.”
Klopp’s idea involves harnessing the emotion of the crowd, which is an illogical extension of the power of any manager, who sometimes struggles to control his own players. But Klopp’s vision is one which fits in with the vision Liverpool has about itself and its search for meaning in the world.
Klopp provides that meaning, Football, for him, is not just about the players, it is about the crowd, the people and the pursuit of happiness.
He may be able to connect with the emotion of crowds, even if the baying of a hostile audience is when Mourinho comes alive.
He has, after all, had his finest moments when overcoming the emotional forces which a manager like Klopp considers important. He held out with Inter at Camp Nou in 2010 and at Anfield in 2014, he demonstrated that if the story requires a bad guy, Mourinho will embrace the role.
Klopp’s view of football may ultimately be exposed as naive, and there will be coaches who wonder about the performance on the touchline as he plays the occasion as well as the game.
It may be that Klopp is only masking his own helplessness by performing on the touchline. As he engages with the crowd and demands more from them, he is keeping himself busy when a more fatalistic type would slump, shrug his shoulders and wonder why the gods have forsaken him.
Klopp told Lineker that the most truthful reason he could give a player who asks him why he has been dropped would be to tell the player he wasn’t good enough.
They both may believe that the game is about players, but they believe it in different ways. Both men are ruthless, but one is in pursuit of a vision, whereas the other increasingly looks like a man waiting for somebody to let him down.
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