Sportsblog: Neville and Carragher know rules of engagement with end-of-season plaudits
Dave Jones with Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville on the final MNF of the season.
Ten years of technological leaps and still the AI algorithm insists on taking us backwards.
A now common Twitter/X problem reared its head Monday night when the timeline was filled with rage about a thing but no sight nor sniff of the actual thing. We threw the words ‘Neville-Carragher-team-of-the-year’ into the search bar and were, unsurprisingly, served up a smorgasbord of shit. In this era where nothing works like it should, social media and especially Elon Musk’s corner of it works hardest at not working at all.
A scroll, however, did bring us one tiny nugget of gold in the bottom of the pan. It wasn’t the XIs which the Premier League’s senior panellists had just served up on Monday Night Football but instead the 2014 version, which back then was a collaborative effort between Neville and Carragher. The date was April 24 and the first reply came within seconds and in all caps: “WHERE THE F*** IS SKRTÉL!?” Where indeed.
With the greatest respect to Martin Skrtel’s 2013-14 campaign at the heart of a Liverpool defence that kept five clean sheets in their last 20 games to help throw away the title, the response was illustrative. The boys went for David Marshall over consensus goalkeeper of the year Petr Cech, John Terry over Vincent Kompany and just one representative of champions Manchester City among the 11.
It reminded you that Neville and Carragher have been at this for a decade now and they’re still getting it wrong. By now we should probably realise that’s the point? Engagement is king and 10 years honing their art has served the two well — they are utterly brilliant at it. The challenge is to not engage. Yet here we are, 300 words in and only getting going with the engagement.
Because another post-Skrtel thought occurred: are Neville and Carragher getting more wrong with age…or less. The teams they unveiled on Monday suggest the answer is both. Neville’s XI had just two or three immediate issues and mostly won a lot of admirers. Carragher’s was a bombscare.
Here are @Carra23 and @GNev2's picks for Premier League Team of the season! 👀🍿 pic.twitter.com/0DWRaus4oW
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 13, 2024
At first glance, we thought Sky Sports had meant to present the two teams vertically but aired them horizontally in error. Carragher’s formation would have been an okay-looking 4-2-3-1 that way, admittedly with Ollie Watkins in goals, an issue but much less of a one than when you realised it was the other way around and the Aston Villa striker was the lone frontman in a 3-2-4-1.
Carragher’s decision to go with a three-man defence helpfully meant he could find room for the Oranje of his eye, Virgil Van Dijk, but also protect him by putting Arsenal’s central defence of William Saliba and Gabriel on either side. There’s a strong argument that this has been Van Dijk’s least impressive Premier League season, a woeful performance at the Emirates in arguably the most consequential game in Liverpool’s title bid a nadir. Fittingly, he responded to Carragher’s nod by being at least partly at fault for two of the three goals Villa put past the Reds defence once Monday night’s actual football began.
Elsewhere, Carragher opted for Kevin De Bruyne in the central right section of his four-man attacking midfield. If that isn’t a sentence you ever expected to read, rest assured, we sure as shit never dreamt of writing it. De Bruyne has started just 13 games this season, coming off the bench in three more and completing 90 minutes a grand total of five times. Team of the March-April? Sure. The season? Never.
Outside KDB, Carragher handed the right wing role to Cole Palmer. This is one of seven places where he and Neville agreed and also the one where both were wrong. Bukayo Sako is both the leading goalscorer and provider for an Arsenal team that enters Tuesday the Spursiest victory for a generation away from having the title in their hands on Sunday’s final day. Mikel Arteta has arguably leaned on Saka too much but he’s responded with a truly stellar campaign. Palmer has been a wonder at times too but in the much-less pressured surrounds of mid-table where his own teammates were often his biggest stressors. Nine penalties are doing too much heavy lifting in his scoring record too.
Agree? Disagree? 👀@Carra23 and @GNev2 hand out the MNF season awards! 🏆 pic.twitter.com/jy6FpPdIlR
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 13, 2024
Other quibbles? Carragher rightly found room for Ollie Watkins. Neville ought to have too. In goal Neville went for Emi Martinez while Carragher opted for Jordan Pickford. The latter was more defensible after Martinez duly threw one into his own net and was found totally out of position for the next two. David Raya is the gold glove winner but maybe there was no goalkeeper of the year? The leader in save percentage? Andre Onana (helps when you have 75 shots a game coming your way). The likely best keeper in 2023/24 was Newcastle’s Nick Pope who was second in clean sheet percentage and top-five in save %. Alas he only started 14 times (but by the De Bruyne rules of engagement that’s more than enough). In their subsequent Awards of the Premier League seasons, Neville’s Favourite Game was a cup tie: Manchester United 4 Liverpool 3. His favourite game indeed.
Maybe Neville and Carragher should go back to a joint effort and just share the blame again. If nothing else, putting these two pillars of England’s golden age, the Baden-Baden epoch, on primetime television to try to build coherent starting line-ups is an annual reminder that Sven Goran Eriksson’s boys of 2006 didn’t pick up much in the way of managerial nous. As we prepare for another major tournament summer in Germany a look back at the 23 who represented the Three Lions there 18 years ago is mostly a list of managerial/coaching failures (Gerrard, Lampard, Neville, Rooney, Ashley Cole, JT, the jury-still-out-on Carrick) and utterly inescapable pundits (Neville again, Carragher, Crouchy, Rio, Owen, Jenas, Joe Cole, Hargreaves, Rooney again, a recently addition to the pack). The rulers of engagement, the masters of distraction.
Perhaps we should try harder to ignore and instead spend a little more time looking into the more pressing questions of 2024. Such as: where the f*** is Martin Skrtel? For a change, social media works and has the answer: he’s filming Hellmann’s mayonnaise ads in Prague with Cech. Between cuts did they chat about their 2014 MNF snubs? No, you’d expect not.
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