We lose that winning Phelan as new tactics chief Kops it

EARLY Saturday kick-offs — and thus earlier drinking kick-offs — have one small silver lining: you have usually had too much to drink by about 10pm and are thus often forced to stagger home prematurely.

This means you might as well watch Match Of The Day, the BBC institution now in its 45th year. (And after four and a half decades, it still combines smug self-satisfaction with intellectual ultra-low-wattage to the kind of annoying degree that makes it best watched half-cut anyway).

So it was that I caught Mike Phelan’s post-match interview from the tunnel at Anfield and I’m sure I wasn’t the only Red to shift uncomfortably as I watched him, bewildered and nervous, blinking under the lights like a mole disturbed from hibernation. The Coneman began alarmingly by announcing we had been ‘outbossed’ in the second half.