Who will put down their phone for the Classlessico?

The gaffer suffered an acute existential crisis during the week. Which is a contagious business.

“We do our utmost at @ExaminerSport, we really do,” he tweeted Tuesday, “and the most read story on our websites Monday (with more than double the next best-read) is a French ice dancer’s wardrobe malfunction. I’m off back to bed.”

It’s certain now that newspapers will soon finish up, that sportswriting will follow shortly after, and that all reading and writing will likely peter out by the turn of the decade.

The internet will go back to what it was set up for in the first place; looking at breasts. With a few other body parts thrown in, to suit everyone. And a few memes. Perhaps a handful of podcasts will survive, reviewing breasts.

At time of writing, today’s paper was due to go ahead regardless. But with time against us, it might be wise to address the last burning question: Can sport outlast sportswriting?

In fact, can sport survive beyond Old Trafford tomorrow afternoon?

We’ll come back to that.

There is a curious complacency out there that sport can play the long game. That it will turn out to be more than a fad that lasted a century or so.

Against all known evidence.

It was noticeable some time ago that kids gave up on sport. That there is no more little guy on the street, or on the lawn, or in the playground. No more bouncing a ball off the wall. Unless you count Red Ball on the iPad.

Sure, the youngsters are still playing a bit, mainly because they are dragged along to ‘academies’ every Saturday, out of guilt and a hunger for cheap babysitting.

And a few probably still knock a bit of fun out of it, until they can get home to the iPad. But mainly they just bring their coaches to the point of deep despair, since it is plainly obvious none of them have kicked or pucked a ball since the week before.

So it looks like the game is up. A generation has cottoned on to the essential pointlessness of sport.

They will have all they need instead on their phones. And if they must get involved in some kind of career, down the line, they’d rather be YouTubers than athletes.

Meanwhile, lest they get any encouragement, they hear day and night that nobody involved in sport is happy anyway.

GAA players spend more time complaining about the time spent training than they do training. Gripes about too few games have been replaced by cribs over too many.

Once, the yardstick was an All Star. Now, you’re nobody unless you’ve had burnout.

Rugby is hanging on only because the likes of Joe Schmidt can manufacture an international player out of any man mountain sent up to him; to replace all those falling apart from the ‘collision focus’.

Soccer, meanwhile, is gone in the other direction, the game evolving so swiftly that only a handful of footballers in the world can keep up with all the running and pressing needed, while maintaining some capacity to control the ball.

That they all play for just three or four teams is becoming a bit too obvious lately. In the short term at least the game’s decision to embed gambling in every nook and cranny has been a lifesaver — since betting on next goal-scorer works just as well at 5-0 as 0-0.

The much talked about ‘second screen’ phenomenon helps, encouraging people to occasionally stop betting and swiping and looking at breasts on their phones, and glance up at the match on the telly.

But eventually everyone will have lost all their money gambling, so what can sustain sport then?

Once, you’d have put your shirt on ‘controvassy’. But has its race been run?

Tomorrow’s big one at OT should be controvassy’s bread and butter. The toxic derby. The Classlessico. The clash of the two gaffers who hate each other most.

Once, we’d metaphorically rope off the technical areas and spend all week compiling insult dossiers and analysing handshake etiquette ahead of this prizefight. And actually, yes, we still do a bit of that, for old times’ sake.

But is anyone’s heart really in it?

Now we look at Mourinho and we can pinpoint the very moment we knew for sure he had lost it. That famous shot of his desk on his first day at Carrington training ground in summer 2016. A United pencil case, a dossier of passing stats, a watch, and, there it was, a Blackberry. A symbol of a man clinging on against obsolescence.

The slip of the Blackberry from market leader to oblivion is regarded as the parable of complacency that should keep everyone on their toes. The lifespan of a CEO has shrunk since, just like the cycle of a football manager.

That is how Antonio Conte comes across now: The career CEO, suited and jackbooted, storming through an acrimonious career, making enemies, stressing everyone out. And, when the whim takes him, downsizing staff with a callous, impersonal message. Then moving on.

And yet, he is somehow a paragon of dignity compared to his counterpart.

Mourinho will be glued scowling to his seat tomorrow in some kind of twisted proof of his impeccable behaviour, perhaps sitting on his gouging finger before unsheathing his passive aggression later on some journo.

Conte will either be gyrating in a pantomime of passion — demonstrating the depth of his ‘buy-in’ like a CEO doing a Ted Talk. Or his lip will be out, sulking, calculating his payoff.

The two of them are to be pitied in their millionaire misery; mockeries of the idea that winning and riches and sport can bring any kind of fulfilment.

Will you watch? Will you read Monday’s match report to find out whose stock has plummeted further?

In the music world, they talk about the week Ed Sheeran had nine singles in the UK Top 10. Unthinkable once, with Top of the Pops in its pomp, it was the week they knew the idea of charts was dead. And maybe music was dead too.

Perhaps one day we will look back at tomorrow’s game and realise nobody glanced up from their phones to see the handshake.