I blame the managers. Of course; that's the first thing they taught me at Football Chairman school: blame the managers!
Red Monday is as much about Jurgen Klopp and Jose Mourinho as it is about two clubs whose shared history sometimes looks too big a fit for either of them. Monday is when they get their first meaningful progress reports of the season.
If United lose they are bogged down in eighth place with Palace, Watford and Bournemouth snapping at their heels just two points behind. If that happens Mourinho's report will have to include phrases like "Jose must learn to pay attention to his past mistakes" and "Jose should focus more on his homework and not so much on the referee."
Both men are good fits for their current jobs.
Klopp wound up in Liverpool because it is a club and a city which would give him the chance to do what he is good at. At Dortmund he took over a dowdy organisation who had been through three managers in a year. He improved players through good coaching and hard work. He had a sincere connection to the people who paid to watch his side. He enjoyed not being Bayern Munich manager more than he would have enjoyed being Bayern manager.
It is hard to imagine him being interested in managing a club like Bayern or Manchester United where every transfer has to be a statement, every quote has to be a headline and every defeat is a catastrophe.
Liverpool, in the long famine since they last won a title, have tried waking up all the ghosts in the old bootroom. No luck. They have looked to France with Gerard Houllier, to Spain with Rafael Benitez and to the X Factor with a young and upcoming Brendan Rogers but despite a few nice sunrises it always went dark again.
Klopp seems to be precisely the right man at the right time. He had hardly been a wet day at Anfield before the club extended his contract to keep him there till 2022. They made the right move. Houllier had brought the culture of French football with him to Anfield. Benitez brought a chunk of Spain with him. Liverpool, though, is always Liverpool.
Klopp's way has been to absorb himself into that rather than to make the club absorb itself into him, his personality and his beliefs. He is embedded now and he pays enough respect to history to keep a sentimental city happy. Now enough of his own ethic is starting to seep onto the field to make that city look to the future with hope and patience.
Down the road, Mourinho wanted the United job because of their past and his sense that he was the man - maybe the only man - big enough to handle all that.
You have to admire the bravado and showmanship which Mourinho brings with him anywhere he goes. He strides toward the challenges that other managers would be wary of. He buys big and fearlessly. He gets in people's heads and he gets on people's nerves and when he gets knocked down he gets up again.
Jose hasn't turned United into a Portuguese club, he has made them a Mourinho club - or he is the process of doing so. If he pulls it off he will own the place. If he fails he will move on.
He has been around the block at enough big clubs not to be surprised at the media obsession with the Wayne Rooney situation. I don't believe that Jose dug a hole for himself when he said early on that he didn't see Wayne as a midfielder. I think he was right.
Wayne Rooney is 30 now. He started playing in the Premier League in 2002 and made his debut for England in 2003. In modern football that is an epic career - already. He has been one of the great strikers of the Premier League era and, even if he has lost a little bit of pace, he has not forgotten more about the cunning art of being a striker.
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