Stagedoor Johnnies now run the show

The rising cult of the project manager last Monday night: Gary Neville applied polish to his punditry crown with a forensic, split-screen dissection of Jon Walters’s set-piece goal at Upton Park — an epic sequence of crafty nudges, darts, blocks and shoves that knocked over enough claret dominos to make way for a tidy finish from Gio Trapattoni’s battering ram du jour.

It was the sort of co-ordinated mayhem that might have graced a playbook from a form of football in which its choreographer’s headwear and enthusiasm for collisions would be better appreciated. But the Neviller made no attempt to conceal his admiration for Tony Pulis’s monstrous creation.

“I loved it,’’ he gushed at half time, wistfully imagining Tony’s wrestling troupe “standing on a windswept, six degrees pitch on a Friday morning for an hour while 15 of the squad sit on the sidelines.