Quinn: Rooney Still Has 'Scorpion' Sting,

We aren't even a third of the way through the season but Liverpool v Manchester United is a mega event: Red Monday.

I blame the managers. Of course; that's the first thing they taught me at Football Chairman school: blame the managers!

Red Monday is as much about Jurgen Klopp and Jose Mourinho as it is about two clubs whose shared history sometimes looks too big a fit for either of them. Monday is when they get their first meaningful progress reports of the season.

Liverpool can go top of the Premier League if they win by three clear goals, which means that the Klopp household will be a lot happier with the report which drops through their letterbox. Jurgen is a bright boy who gets on well with those around him and learns quickly.

If United lose they are bogged down in eighth place with Palace, Watford and Bournemouth snapping at their heels just two points behind. If that happens Mourinho's report will have to include phrases like "Jose must learn to pay attention to his past mistakes" and "Jose should focus more on his homework and not so much on the referee." 

Both men are good fits for their current jobs.

Klopp wound up in Liverpool because it is a club and a city which would give him the chance to do what he is good at.  At Dortmund he took over a dowdy organisation who had been through three managers in a year. He improved players through good coaching and hard work. He had a sincere connection to the people who paid to watch his side. He enjoyed not being Bayern Munich manager more than he would have enjoyed being Bayern manager. 

It is hard to imagine him being interested in managing a club like Bayern or Manchester United where every transfer has to be a statement, every quote has to be a headline and every defeat is a catastrophe.

Liverpool, in the long famine since they last won a title, have tried waking up all the ghosts in the old bootroom. No luck. They have looked to France with Gerard Houllier, to Spain with Rafael Benitez and to the X Factor with a young and upcoming Brendan Rogers but despite a few nice sunrises it always went dark again.

Klopp seems to be precisely the right man at the right time. He had hardly been a wet day at Anfield before the club extended his contract to keep him there till 2022. They made the right move. Houllier had brought the culture of French football with him to Anfield. Benitez brought a chunk of Spain with him. Liverpool, though, is always Liverpool.

Klopp's way has been to absorb himself into that rather than to make the club absorb itself into him, his personality and his beliefs. He is embedded now and he pays enough respect to history to keep a sentimental city happy. Now enough of his own ethic is starting to seep onto the field to make that city look to the future with hope and patience.

Down the road, Mourinho wanted the United job because of their past and his sense that he was the man - maybe the only man - big enough to handle all that.

You have to admire the bravado and showmanship which Mourinho brings with him anywhere he goes. He strides toward the challenges that other managers would be wary of. He buys big and fearlessly. He gets in people's heads and he gets on people's nerves and when he gets knocked down he gets up again.

At United he is compulsive viewing. It isn't easy for anybody to go to Old Trafford and to patrol the touchline with Sir Alex Ferguson watching from the stand. That run of 22 Fergie-led seasons in the top three is too recent in the memory for there to be much room for failure.

David Moyes found that out the hard way. He wanted to change too much, too soon and didn't have the flamboyant personality or the results to pull it off. United then tried to import a Dutch solution but Louis van Gaal ended up with some of the bickering we associate with Dutch sides yet not the style.

Jose hasn't turned United into a Portuguese club, he has made them a Mourinho club - or he is the process of doing so. If he pulls it off he will own the place. If he fails he will move on.

He has been around the block at enough big clubs not to be surprised at the media obsession with the Wayne Rooney situation. I don't believe that Jose dug a hole for himself when he said early on that he didn't see Wayne as a midfielder. I think he was right. 

Wayne Rooney is 30 now. He started playing in the Premier League in 2002 and made his debut for England in 2003. In modern football that is an epic career - already. He has been one of the great strikers of the Premier League era and, even if he has lost a little bit of pace, he has not forgotten more about the cunning art of being a striker.

He is at that stage where he needs the time to adjust his style to accommodate the loss of explosive pace but keep that brilliant positioning and finishing in play. He is in a very competitive situation for a place up front in the current United set-up. Zlatan Ibrahimovic is Mourinho's boy, young Marcus Rashford just keeps scoring and in these early days Jose is under a lot of scrutiny.

Rooney will know though that his manager is a character who has never backed off a big decision. If he didn't want Rooney at Old Trafford, Wayne would be somewhere else by now. He has also been around the block long enough to know that in football things change very quickly. An injury or a suspension to somebody else - or better still a really convincing cameo as a sub - can shift the pecking order at any time.

As a midfielder, Rooney is what people in the game refer to as a crab: he moves things sideways. He doesn't give you the burst of acceleration or the cutting forward pass that cuts half the opposing team out of the picture in a stroke. A lot of good players have made great careers out of being crabs but being a crab is not Wayne Rooney's nature. He is a scorpion. He still has that sting. 
   
The great antidote for any striker is to score a goal or two and Rooney knows that when he hits the net a couple of times this uncertain period of his career will be over with. 

Red Monday is exciting enough to justify it's billing as an event in itself but it's not about who will win the league this year, it is about the characters at the centre of the drama.

Klopp will know that, unlike most of the years that Liverpool have been away from the top of the table, beating United is no longer the next best thing to silverware.

Mourinho will know that Eric Cantona was right when he said that the seagulls follow the trawler because they think there will be sardines. Nobody gives more sardines to the media seagulls then Mourinho does. When he puts together any sort of a good run the papers will be filled again with testimonies to his genius.

 And Rooney knows that what goes around comes around. He will bide his time.

Those storylines are why I'll be tuning into the soap opera, Red Monday. 

Credit: Skysports.com