Before we decide exactly where we should be ranking Virgil van Dijk v Wayne Rooney among history’s great live-to-air TV face-offs – and where that monumental coming together last Tuesday sits relative to, say, Phillip Schofield v Katie Hopkins from 2013 in the all-time list of broadcasting’s white-knuckle head to heads – let’s at least say this about it: you were quite glad you had stayed tuned.
And that’s vanishingly rare these days after the football, isn’t it? In the loyalty-neutering era of the packaged-out rights deal, we’ll go wherever we must for our matches – Sky, TNT, ITV, BBC, Dazn or even, as in this case, Amazon Prime. But it’s likely to be specifically the game that we’re after. A bit of build-up, possibly. The stuff afterwards? Less and less.
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Indeed, if you’ve ever walked out of the room after a match, leaving the telly on, and then wandered back in an hour or so later, it can come as something of a surprise to discover that people are still being paid to stand around a branded table and talk about the game you watched.
You’ve prepared, consumed and cleared away an entire evening meal, and somehow Roy Keane has yet to be fully dislodged from the topic of how unacceptably demotivated Manchester United’s midfield was, earlier in the day. Impossible not to respect the stamina involved. Impossible, also, to feel you have missed anything you really needed to see.
Yet there we were at Anfield, well after the final whistle had blown on Liverpool v Real Madrid, witnessing (can you believe it?) genuine post-match drama.
Because, before all this, Liverpool, the reigning champions, had lost four consecutive Premier League games and the world turned to Rooney for the dispassionate clarity on this slump that only a childhood Everton supporter and former Manchester United player could be expected to bring. Rooney said that he thought that Van Dijk and Mo Salah hadn’t been offering the leadership that he had been expecting since they signed their new deals in April. Van Dijk replied that he found the criticism “lazy”.
And now fate and a television producer had contrived to place these two antagonists side by side at Amazon’s pitchside desk.
A moment’s sympathy at this point for the former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler, destined to be forever overlooked in history’s accounts of this event as the guest on the other side of Van Dijk, which is bit like being the floor of the Sistine Chapel, except in a football punditry context.
Anyway, then it all kicked off. Or kind of. One might not entirely accept the subsequent media framing that this was the moment Van Dijk “took his dispute to a new level”.
“I think at times the noise was a lot,” said Van Dijk when the subject of the criticism came up.
“You looking at anybody round here in particular?” asked Gabby Logan.
“No, no,” he replied, “not at all.”
Nor might one completely agree with another paper’s report that this was when Van Dijk “ruthlessly called [Rooney] out to his face”.
“I think the comment that I signed my new deal and then it was like ‘That is it’ and I let it slide, I think that was a bit… but that’s my personal opinion and we move on,” was Van Dijk’s somewhat Delphic summary of his position.
So, yes, in the final analysis, these few moments of muted awkwardness probably weren’t Russell Harty v Grace Jones from 1980 – the slap heard around early-evening television. In all honesty, Van Dijk v Rooney wasn’t even the aforementioned Schofield v Hopkins on This Morning, that time the latter attempted to come over all snooty about the kind of vulgar people who name their children after places, only to be reminded by the former that she herself has a daughter called India. Game over!
But that’s not the point. The point is, Van Dijk v Rooney was, at this particular point in history, a defibrillator for television’s post-match segment. OK, the format was still flat on the floor, but suddenly its eyes were open and it was breathing again.
Can it rise up and kick on from here? No idea, but it won’t be Van Dijk’s or Rooney’s fault if it doesn’t.
Photograph: Amazon Prime