Some Nevilles are more equal than others.
After his gap year at Valencia, Phil Neville is back on our screens and appeared alongside Alan Shearer on Match of the Day 2 last night. While Gary is the toast of the punditry world, and can afford to be selective in his Monday Night Football appearances, Phil is still plugging away on late-night highlight shows.
Gary was Valencia's manager, Phil his assistant.
As the Manchester United News run stories about Gary's plans to build two skyscrapers and a hotel, they focus on Phil's failure to sell his house.
Poor Phil just can't eclipse the shadow of his older brother. He strikes you as a man whose purpose in life is solely to be liked, yet is eternally damned to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition.
Phil is the guy who latches onto The Cool Thing and stays interested in it for a little too long: he's the guy still shuffling about the streets playing Pokemon Go. It is easy to imagine him gesturing wildly in feverish exuberance to Gary that he's found a Pikachu at the bottom of the garden, only to be met with an aloof harrumph by his brother, before Gary turns his back to return to signing online petitions for the World Wildlife Fund, as "adults worry about the captivity of real animals".
(To extend the metaphor, Phil almost certainly believes that WWF is still an acronym for wrestling).
If Gary jumped the shark at Valencia, then Phil is the earnest friend who stayed behind to build a bigger boat just because somebody asked for it.
Before resurfacing on Match the Day this season, Phil stayed on at Valencia after Gary was sacked, and was roundly humiliated by the club. The club let him stay on, but relegated him from matchday duties, meaning he was just left to linger about the training ground. Phil, genuine as always, stayed on in the belief that he had a future at the club.
He left the club at the end of the season, spending two months: cutting a figure similar to that of political advisor Glen Cullen in The Thick Of It: desperately isolated owing to his connection with a previous regime, and now screaming silently into the void of a new institutional moral abattoir. In a further blow, Phil's future was more or less an afterthought: coming to the world's attention three days after Gary was fired.
But now he is back upon the English consciousness and was on Match of the Day 2 last night to analyse a goalkeeper who hit the headlines this week for criticising Gary. Loris Karius said in an interview with the Daily Mail that "I don’t care what Gary Neville said. He was a top player, then he was a manager for a short bit and now he is back to being an expert again".
Karius' defence was decidedly less fortified during yesterday's game: errors by Dejan Lovren and Joel Matip leaving him with a couple of saves that he couldn't make.
Gary did Sky's commentary on the Man United game earlier in the day, meaning Phil would be the first Neville to comment on Karius' poor performance against West Ham. What an opportunity!
So Phil presumably stared into the mirror in BBC's Green Room before Match of the Day went live, fixing his jacket, puffing out his chest before roaring YOU CAN DO THIS!!! at himself in tempestuous preparation. (This image relies on the assumption he decided not to wear said jacket on screen - presumably his body temperature had risen to a dangerously high level after such a barnstorming psych-up).
And he did it. For once, with Phil dancing in a dusk untouched by his brother's long shadow, he was the Neville who could set the agenda, and sit back and watch the #content flow.
And so he stepped up to the plate, and delivered an extremely strongly-worded takedown of Karius.
Here it is:
"Keep your mouth shut and do your job".
Those are strong words by Phil, and it is easy to imagine him kicking back in satisfaction at dreaming them up: this was the Phil Neville mic drop.
But then, eternal melancholy struck. Jamie Carragher had said pretty much the exact same thing hours earlier on Sky. Spitting rage at half-time, Carragher advised Karius to "shut up and just do your job".
Didi Hamann criticised Carragher online over his words on Karius - "poor form", he termed it - before it transpired that Hamann was only saying it in response to Neville, before being forced to have a pop at Carragher too:
Me & the Kaiser are ok now! pic.twitter.com/2P0g3Xt2sZ
— Jamie Carragher (@Carra23) December 12, 2016
So Phil dropped the mic, only to look up and see the audience had already left; he evaded one shadow only to wallow in another. And then the Beeb made it clear that he was just sticking up for Gary. And then Mark 'Chappers' Chapman made a gag about his sister. Oh, Phil!
Other highlights in that clip include him sounding like Donald Trump criticising one of his own policies (as he is guaranteed to do), blithely declaring 'It's a disaster of a wall!' and his rowing back on an earlier conviction: saying Karius should shut up for a couple of seasons, only to immediately compromise on "one or two games" after the follow-up question from Mark 'Chappers' Chapman.
Phil Neville: never without misery, never without hope.
See Also: Weekend TV Review: Liverpool And United's Abject Limits Bring Best Out Of Carragher And Neville
