Forget goals, noise of pundits is now the game’s new theatre

THERE was a time when Manchester United colliding with Liverpool would reverberate through football for days, though it took a great deal less than Carra-gate to consign Saturday’s Old Trafford clash to the margins of the conversation.

An £89million acquisition — Paul Pogba — wasn’t fit to play and Liverpool’s expensively assembled defence vanished, but Jose Mourinho was soon asked about what a Dutch pundit, Frank de Boer, had said about Marcus Rashford on BT Sport. Mourinho, who plays this media game like a maestro, did not disappoint, eviscerating de Boer as ‘the worst manager in the history of the Premier League’.

We are accelerating into a world of controversialism in which the football has been lost, drowned out by the sound and fury of the pantomime which surrounds it.

If the events of the past 24 hours haven’t taught us that the game itself is no longer enough to sustain the demand for instant sporting gratification, consider a few numbers. Manchester City’s Champions League match against Basle attracted just 79,000 viewers on BT Sport last week. A clip of Jermaine Jenas declaring on the same channel’s Premier League

Review Show that his Newcastle team-mates lacked ambition secured 1.25million hits within a few hours.

Into this new space step the controversialists — analysts who are looking to fulfil the broadcasters’ clamour for attention and hits, as the audience gravitates from TV to digital devices, and who are ready to bite people’s heads off in pursuit of them, if they have to.

Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville have become the two archexponents: a slightly uncomfortable pairing at first, considering that visceral Liverpool/Manchester hate, but one which seemingly now operates in tandem. Neville, ever the shop steward, seems more naturally disposed to dishing it out. But Carragher, inherently the more thoughtful, has followed along.

It’s in keeping with the kind of blue-collar players they were that each puts in the hard yards, backing up any criticism with a level of knowledge and insight which leaves all the rest trailing behind.

This newspaper’s own expert analysts, Jamie Redknapp, Martin Keown and Chris Sutton, are equally trenchant in their opinions, which are often unflinchingly strong on these pages as we plot the course of the season. In one of the Monday Night

Football post-match debates which have become a football broadcasting sub-genre all of their own, this approach to co-commentary and studio analysis recently became the subject of a compelling discussion. (‘Analysis of the analysis’, as Neville tweeted in response to

Sportsmail’s discussion of his work on these pages, two weeks ago.)

‘We never go into any single game thinking, “I’m going to criticise