Decisions, decisions, decisions.
In a game between two closely-matched sides, decision-making tends to make the difference between them and that was exactly the case as Manchester United beat Liverpool 2-1 on Sunday at Anfield. One manager got it right and one manager got it wrong.
To the victors, first. Louis Van Gaal appears to have got it right, at last. For the first time in his opening few months as United manager he has summoned consecutive convincing performances from one of the most expensively assembled sides in the history of the sport. The damning reality, though, is that the starting team he stuck with for both the wins against Liverpool and Tottenham contained only two signings from his era—Ander Herrera and Daley Blind.
Watch match highlights: Liverpool 1, Manchester United 2 || Hull City 2, Chelsea 3 || QPR 1, Everton 2 ||
In truth, it feels as though Van Gaal’s best decision has been to stop making so many decisions. The heavy-handed experimentation has stopped at precisely the moment that United has started to play a bit. Wayne Rooney is back up front, in a plain old 4-3-3. Phil Jones and Chris Smalling have been given a few games together to try and form a partnership at the centre of defence. The midfield trio of Herrera, Michael Carrick and Marouane Fellaini is a simple, verging on simplistic interpretation of what it takes to succeed in rough-around-the-edges English football: a little bit of brains, a lot of brawn and some pace.
Arranged around these ideas, United finally looks alright. Not spectacular, yet, but pretty good. The great shame for Van Gaal is that in some ways rather than making him look clever now, it makes him look a bit dumb previously. Why did all this take so long to figure out, Louis? Didn’t everyone tell you that Rooney wasn’t a midfielder, that instead Herrera would invigorate the midfield and that Juan Mata was both a neat passer and a more-than-useful finisher?
The awkward truth for Van Gaal is, perhaps, that this winning team of his does look a lot more like what a lot of other people wanted than what he was choosing to put out every week until relatively recently. Maybe if he’d listened to a few people on the outside sooner United would be in the title race after this weekend, rather than opening up the slightly uninspiring possibility of getting second place.
Maybe. But it isn’t all as easy as that, as Brendan Rodgers himself demonstrated quite separately on Sunday.
Initially, Rodgers held off on bringing the hugely popular Steven Gerrard back into his team against United. Liverpool’s run of 10 wins and three draws from 13 league games while Gerrard was (mostly) out injured made that an absolutely justifiable choice. But losing 1-0 at half time, and perhaps pre-empting calls from the likes of Jamie Carragher, Jim Beglin and half of the stadium around him, Rodgers changed his mind and put Gerrard back in for what would be his comeback game and final go at great rivals United before moving to MLS in the summer.
It didn’t go well. At all. Taking the captain’s armband off Jordan Henderson and absolutely desperate to make an impact on the game, Gerrard managed it very, very quickly. He was sent off, deservedly, for a stamp on Herrera after 30 seconds on the pitch, and in so doing he killed off his team’s chances in the game like a paint baller who’d forgotten what all his mates looked like but insisted on shooting anyway.
Rodgers had got it wrong. He sent on a man who needed this too much. Not a cool, experienced head as he was pitched by Carragher, but exactly the opposite—a hothead, whose ego has not diminished in line with his ability to bend games to his will at the age of 34. The tough call was to ignore the outside pressure and do what Rodgers has shown he knows to be the right thing: stick with his young, emerging team and trust them—as he has done so many times before—to come back on their own, rather than reverting to the base-level idea that the only answer to any problem at Liverpool FC is Gerrard.
The player himself came out and took responsibility for what had happened after the game, which is a decent response, but come on. This was his manager’s mistake. Rodgers couldn’t resist the calls to bring back Gerrard and his team ultimately lost both the game against United and the best chance of getting a Champions League place this season because of it.
The signs were all there—Gerrard slipped at the end of last season to cost his team the title and he was at the centre of the team that started really poorly this campaign, a dramatic turnaround initiated almost as soon as he was out of the team. But his manager made the wrong decision, and you can’t help but feel that the pressure to play the well-loved Gerrard made him do it.
So, after all that, we’re left with the same old question. “Who’d be a football manager, eh?” Everyone shouts advice at you and sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s wrong; you’re blamed when it goes wrong and someone (probably this writer) won’t even give you credit when it goes right. It sounds awful.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter