Liverpool sense chance to inflict killer blow on Mourinho

It is a tribute to the indelible grandeur of Manchester United that even a season of constipated football and toxic managerial asides can still seem epic-scale and entirely engrossing. What have we got? Goals? Sparkling football? Er, no. But we do have Jose telling people off at the weekly pressroom postmortems, all the while trying heroically to pretend that he suffers as a noble deed to save someone else.

Not that Mourinho or United are ready to roll over just yet. Defeat at Valencia in midweek should not cloud the fact United have qualified for the last 16 of the Uefa Champions League from a tough-looking group.

Free-flowing victory at home to Fulham last Saturday was significant even against a team who also conceded four to Cardiff. At the end of which one of the most febrile away days in English football’s unremittingly febrile history arrives at a fascinating moment in the seasons of both United and Liverpool.

For Jurgen Klopp the weekend’s big-ticket game offers a rare and precious thing for any Liverpool manager. Victory could effectively kill Manchester United’s league season and perhaps even add a decisive blow in Mourinho’s own extended retreat from Old Trafford. Should United lose and the teams above them win, they would be 11 points off fourth spot, the likely base level for Mourinho to stay in the job into next summer. On the other hand, victory for United — or even the avoidance of defeat — could be a significant marker too given the history of this fixture, which has tended to stand as a staging point in the snakes and ladders of rising eras, ruined empires and periods of retrenchment.