Ken Early: Sterile Old Trafford clash badly missed a Gerrard or a Keane

As Louis van Gaal saw where Geoff Shreeves was going with the question, his eyes narrowed irritably. Shreeves was asking him to comment on the difference between Manchester United's performance before and after half-time.

It was clear from his tone that Shreeves, like nearly everyone else who had watched the match, believed the second half to have been an improvement on the first. And it was equally clear that Van Gaal considered this to be a stupid point of view.

“We played much better in the first half,” he answered. “We have controlled the game entirely.”

If Van Gaal really meant what he said, and wasn’t just giving in to the impulse to talk down to Shreeves, you have to wonder whether the Premier League’s global appeal can survive much more of this elite coaching.

Manchester United versus Liverpool is marketed as the most-watched club game on the planet. Nobody claims it's the best – that would be Real Madrid vs Barcelona – but it is broadcast live in more than 200 countries – more than three times as many as its Spanish counterpart.

That gigantic global audience endured a first-half of stunning, almost laughable tedium, contested by two over-coached, over-prepared sides full of players who seemed afraid to express themselves in case what came out didn’t fit in with the game plan. No wonder the only people who seemed to enjoy it were the coaches.

Panicky exchange

Everyone seemed to be waiting for everyone else to step up and do something. The signature moment came when Emre Can and Martin Skrtel stood just inside their own half swapping ponderous passes. Back and forth went the ball, and the buck with it, until belated United pressure eventually forced Can to retreat into a panicky exchange with Simon Mignolet, which almost culminated in an own goal.

If that moment looked like an indictment of the influence of overbearing managers, Brendan Rodgers later seemed to absolve himself of responsibility when he told journalists: "I like players to take the initiative in a game and be proactive."

Somebody ought to tell his players, because Liverpool’s most difficult moments in the first half arose from their slavish adherence to a misguided game plan. They kept giving the ball away with sloppy short passes around the edge of their own box. It seems unlikely that defenders as nervous as Dejan Lovren, Mignolet and Skrtel would choose to play this way at Old Trafford unless they were under clear instruction to do so.

Long balls

Indeed, the thing Rodgers seemed most disappointed with was not his players’ penchant for taking suicidal risks in defence, but rather the way in which they were too eager to hit Christian Benteke with long balls. “I think unless you can keep the ball for longer periods, all that happens is it goes up to him,” he said.

Rodgers didn’t explain why passing early to Benteke was a bad thing in itself, especially when the alternative is giving the ball away in your own third because you don’t have the ability to execute your preferred short-passing build-up.

Van Gaal correctly identified Daley Blind’s opening goal as the decisive moment. It broke the sterile equilibrium and from that point the action became more ragged, more disjointed, more of a player’s than a coach’s game. The subsequent goals all flowed from moments of individual quality – Carrick’s piercing pass for Herrera, Benteke’s stunning overhead kick, Anthony Martial’s audacious dribble.

The United manager blamed Liverpool for the lack of spectacle in the first half: “For a good match you need two teams.” The implication was that his team had done their bit, which was pushing it. Neither team had had a shot on target, neither had even had a yellow card. Both had been complicit in the systems failure.

The build-up had been enlivened by the publication of extracts from Steven Gerrard’s second autobiography, one of which covered his sending-off within 38 seconds of coming on as a substitute when the sides met at Anfield last March.

Liverpool’s first-half performance that day had been just as tepid as Saturday’s. “We had stood off United in the first half and made very few tackles,” Gerrard writes.

“It went against everything built into my DNA. Tackling and collisions mattered against Manchester United.”

Gerrard had plenty of bad games against United so it’s not as though he can offer a foolproof guide to playing against them, but his idea here is basically the same as Mike Tyson’s: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Collision

Players like Roy Keane and Graeme Souness used to try the same thing to break the stalemate in a game like Saturday’s: get a tackle in, even if it’s just a foul. There’s something about a collision that tests a player’s ability to stick to his game plan.

Physical aggression, and all the flaring-up of mental energy that goes with it, jolts players out of the system and into the moment. That’s when you start to find out what they’re really made of.

Gerrard and Keane were the kind of players who always tried things, even if they were sometimes the wrong things.

Too many of the players on either side last Saturday were content to stand by and let the system do the work, as though forgetting that any system is only as powerful as the players who make it up.