A barely scraped fifth place and some mechanical Playstation football to boot was enough to convince Liverpool bosses not to pop another shilling into the Slot machine. In doing so, they defenestrated the Dutch dud, who had laboriously removed the hubcaps from the cuckooed Kloppian climax of the previous campaign, and delivered a hearty slap to the charlatan wasp nest.

Greek waiter Iraola – the unctuous UEFA acolyte whose team unremarkably crawled into sixth – has been jettisoned into bottom-feeder pole for the phat contract at Anfield. This marries up well with the current trend of discarding Airpods for wired headphones. Why, you might well ask? Well, that’s the current pro footballer gesture that seemingly rejects progress in the guise of technology offering useless and flawed features in favour of functionality.

Yes, something that actually does the job properly.

Could we all have crossed the Rubicon onto the realm of common sense?

Probably not if Manuel is being touted as the next top Kop flop. Greek, Spanish? Does it matter? Once they don the skintight black tracksuit and white trainers, and they gas about pressing and false nines, the waters break in the wanker womb of premiership appointments.

At this very moment, a tsunami of Rosenior-grade cocks will be dusting down their B-Badge Powerpoints and preparing themselves for their first irascible presser and incomprehensible pitch-side note-passing.

Many of them probably can’t see what’s around the corner, and that’s not because all their terminally useless players can’t place the ball correctly for them (that’s a tidy football reference).

That’s that the forthcoming World Cup will witness some wowser worldies, and silver-bullet seeking club owners will be hoovering up plenty of George Weah cousin fodder for shoehorned, guaranteed starts next term.

It’s almost as if the owners will embark on major tournament splurges because they have that little faith in their coaches’ ability to build winning teams…