The Warm-Up: The No 1 Old Boys' Managerial Agency

Good news for people who like familiar faces: two of British football’s usual suspects returned to work on Wednesday as sleeping giants Derby County and Aston Villa typed the word ‘Steve’ into their managerial database and crossed their fingers.

For the Rams, it’s the resumption of Operation McClaren after a brief hiatus. You may recall that season one ended on something of a cliffhanger, the camera zooming in on the face of our affable hero as he boarded the fast train to Newcastle in search of fame, fortune and some Sports Direct freebies. But now he’s back in town, determined to make it work with his old squeeze. It was always you, Derby. Honest.

Over at Villa Park, newly-svelte wordsmith Steve Bruce takes the reins after Roberto Di Matteo’s downfall. Some fans will doubtless feel a bit conflicted about the new man’s ties with Birmingham City (“Once a Bluenose, alway’s [sic] a Bluenose,” to adapt Wayne Rooney’s factually incorrect line), but there’s no denying that the man knows his way around a promotion bid.

Pints of wine all round for the old guard.

So impressed were FA bosses with England’s magnificent display against Slovenia, they have reportedly decided that Gareth Southgate is the man to take the manager’s job on a full-time basis, barring any embarrassing slip-up against Scotland next month or some mid-level scandal.

News to stir the soul, we’re sure you’ll agree. Later this hour: milkman expresses mild pleasure at unseasonably warm morning in October; teacher eats apple while listening to Coldplay; scientists report that chemical make-up of UK soil is “still largely stable”; water droplets coalesce into clouds as normal above town in East Anglia.

It looks as though Rooney’s season could yet get worse: after being dropped by club and country in recent weeks, the Daily Mirror report that Manchester United are increasingly minded to ditch the striker altogether this summer.

Worrying times for the 30-year-old and probably not what he imagined when he told Jose Mourinho that he fancied the Juan Mata role at Old Trafford this season

It takes real commitment to drama to begin a simmering feud at an event literally called Match for Peace. But that’s just what El Pibe de Oro managed to do, picking a fight with Juan Sebastian Veron (side note: officially still cool as hell) and needing to be restrained at the half-time whistle.

Bravo, Diego. Bravo.

Yeah… you really have to be scoring these, lads.

Paolo Guerrero is probably best known to British football fans for scoring the goal that denied Chelsea the Club World Cup in 2012. That or warming the Bayern Munich bench for a couple of years.

But he’s a genuine superstar in South America as this piece by Luis Miguel Echegaray highlights. The Warm-Up isn’t convinced by the author’s appraisal of Ramiro Funes Mori, mind.

Not content with reinventing football on a weekly basis, Pep Guardiola has turned his polymath’s glare on one of the great issues of our time: the relentless march of technology and its deleterious effects on human experience.

Sergio Aguero tells the tale: “It seems that one time, he entered the massage rooms and saw one of my team-mates – I don’t know who it was – relaxing with his phone. Maybe he did not like it. From then, he cut the internet.

“In the dressing room, where everything is all closed, there is no signal. In the massage room and pool we don’t have the internet.”

A noble cause, even if Aguero himself, for the time being at least, remains bonded to the mainframe. “Upstairs there is a little bit of 3G,” the Argentine added.

Well yes, but only until Guardiola finds out and takes a chainsaw to the nearest phone mast.

It’s a bit of a bleak one as far as the fixture list goes. The best The Warm-Up can offer you is some quarter-final action from the Women’s Under-17 World Cup. Handily for synergy purposes, North Korea vs Ghana and Japan vs England are both live on Eurosport.