No self-congratulation from Van Gaal, but Rodgers is no longer the prince of positivity

Louis van Gaal came to England with the reputation of a man with an inflated opinion of himself. When Ajax hired him in 1991, the trophyless 39-year-old told them: "Congratulations on signing the best coach in the world."

But if van Gaal’s estimation of his own worth has at times verged on the delusional, he remains clear-sighted when it comes to seeing what is actually happening out on the pitch.

Invited by Sky Sports to eulogise his team's 3-0 victory over Liverpool, the Dutchman refused to play ball.

“I am very satisfied with the result, but I think that we still can improve. We gave a lot of unnecessary balls away . . . We had a lot of space in the second half, so we could have played the ball very easily. And nevertheless, we gave the ball away, and that’s not good. And I shall ask the players tomorrow: why?”

So the day after Manchester United’s players complete their sixth league win in a row, their coach will be conducting a training-ground inquiry into their sloppiness. If that is the standard the manager is demanding, United are probably in the right hands.

Only once this season has Brendan Rodgers been in the happy position of speaking to the media after a 3-0 win. That was at White Hart Lane at the end of August. Raheem Sterling scored early for Liverpool, then Nacer Chadli missed a chance to equalise. Steven Gerrard lost the ball seven times in the first half, but converted a soft second-half penalty, and Alberto Moreno scored a third after surprising Spurs' defence with his pace on the counter-attack. Tottenham had 63 per cent of the possession but didn't know what to do with the ball.

Funny games

It was one of those funny games where the result was more emphatic than the performance. Not that you would have guessed it from listening to Rodgers afterwards: “Everything that could be good in our game was there . . . We were exceptional. We showed our quality and we showed our intensity. It was very much a great symbol of what we are, which is a very good team.”

He sounded happy. The best managers never are.

Liverpool have won only four league games since then, and Rodgers has not had so many chances to use his favourite words, “exceptional” and “quality”. As Liverpool’s results have collapsed, last season’s prince of positivity has assumed a peevish and defeatist tone, while his messages have become contradictory and confused.

At the start of the season, he insisted Liverpool would not struggle to integrate a batch of new signings, as Spurs had the previous season. “It’s a different vision that we have here at Liverpool. There’s a strategy behind what we’re doing. The players we’re bringing in have a clear profile in terms of where we want them to play, what their role is.”

His thinking on that seems to have changed. Last week he argued: “the problem [with results] was that I had brought in a lot of new players who didn’t know how I worked. They didn’t get it.”

Last December, Jose Mourinho said Liverpool could win the league because their absence from Europe gave them "holiday" time to work on the training ground. Rodgers dismissed it as mischief-making by the Chelsea manager: "Don't worry, I know all the games."

If that was mind games, then 12 months on Rodgers is playing mind games against himself: "The difficulty has been that I have had no coaching time because of the demands of the Champions League. " You can imagine Mourinho thinking, welcome to football at the top level.

One of the things that makes Rodgers interesting is the way he is always prepared to offer a detailed meta-commentary on his own performance. In April, with Liverpool riding high, he told Sports Illustrated that he was a "democratic . . . educational" manager. Last week, before Basel knocked them out of the Champions League, he said he had reverted to an "autocratic" style.

Technical game

Announcing yet another change of approach before kick-off at Old Trafford, he said: “I just wanted to return to a more technical game, we have been more solid recently after results weren’t great.”

In the event, Liverpool and Rodgers’ performance against United was not so bad. They have no good strikers, so it made sense to start without one. They had no shortage of chances – they just put them all straight at David de Gea.

But again there were puzzling, random-seeming decisions, like the selection of Brad Jones in place of Simon Mignolet. Jones avoided making any obvious Mignolet-style handling errors by jumping out of the way whenever it looked like the ball might come near him.

Does Rodgers now stick with Jones and his radical, contactless style of goalkeeping, or restore the humiliated Mignolet to the team? Beyond impressing on the owners that a new goalkeeper is a priority (and surely he could have done that with an email) it’s hard to see how the decision left the team better off than before.

This week Rodgers might reflect again on the truth of his somewhat self-pitying aphorism that “command is lonely”. But Liverpool’s lonely leader isn’t entitled to feel sorry for himself when his team are so plainly in need of leadership. He might be better off trying to remember what direction he’s trying to lead them in.