COLUMN: Picking your best Liverpool and Manchester United team... it's a combined waste of time

If I asked you to name your five favourite members of Take That and Boyzone to create your ultimate super boy band, could you? Or would you look at me blankly as if that’s the stupidest idea since the gatekeeper at Troy thought a wooden horse would really spruce up the place?

Perhaps you’d prefer to put together your dream cabinet using Tory and Labour Government ministers from the past 75 years?

Maybe drama is more your thing? Why not combine the casts of Brookside and Neighbours to come up with the definitive soap opera cul de sac?

By now you’re probably staring at these words blankly, wondering what sort of nonsense this is?

Well, if that’s the case then you will get some sort of grasp of how I feel about combined XIs, those bizarre football team amalgams Sky Sports, clickbait websites and social media betting accounts are so keen on.

Last week Steve McClaren was asked to name his combined Manchester United 1999 and Liverpool 2020 XI.

The question was weird enough, the answer even more baffling: Schmeichel, Neville, Stam, Van Dijk, Irwin, Beckham, Keane, Scholes, Giggs, Yorke, Cole.

Yep, McClaren, the assistant at Old Trafford when the Red Devils won the treble, named 10 United players... and only Virgil Van Dijk from this current Liverpool side who have dropped just two points from 26 league games so far this season.

It couldn’t have been much more one-sided if you were putting together a combined XI of Germany’s 1990 World Cup-winning squad and a herd of sheep.

But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Combined XIs aren’t there to create sensible debate.

Quite the opposite, they’re there to provoke division and tap into the tribalism of football and social media.

It’s no good having a couple of people put forward suggestions of a reasonable team which allows a few onlookers to nod their head in agreement before going back to the important things in their lives.

To get the traffic your website needs, to get your video shared and to get your brand noticed, you need to get it seen.

The best way? Put out some divisive nonsense that will encourage pre-ordained, partisan comments.

The Liverpool fans disagree in their droves, the United fans make up weird logic to convince themselves McClaren got it right.

Before you know it, they’re arguing amongst themselves, fans of other clubs are wading in to call both sets of supporters plonkers, the company behind the latest combined XI question gets richer and you’ve wasted your dinner hour sending prickly crying-while-laughing emojis to @BarryYNWA3471.

Combined XIs are a false economy. They offer no real insight and are totally illogical when trying to compare teams from different eras.

They’re a complete waste of time, just like trying to name your favourite cabinet or dream soap opera line-up when you could be enjoying a belting album of pop classics from Ronan, Robbie, Mikey, Shane and Howard.