Cheer up boys: When did managing football teams become such a miserable experience?

The glib prescription to “count your blessings” is guaranteed to enrage rather than assuage any of us whose countenances occasionally betray a certain world-weariness.

If one accepts that a pardonable response to “Cheer up love, it might never happen” is a kick up the Khyber, then the contention that one is sick of looking at football managers’ faces contorting into Medusa stares or milk-curdling misery sounds like the most screaming hypocrisy. Which, of course, it is. Yet the glumness is so prevalent in public places – responses to goals, victories and welcome draws apart – that one wonders if it’s earnest or simply a mask.

Too many football people forget that Bill Shankly’s “life and death” remark was initially made about the intense rivalry of Liverpool and Everton supporters, not himself, and when he reprised it years later and confessed that for him, as well, “it’s more important than that”, he was being sincere but solipsistic.

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While he regretted how putting “all my heart and soul” into the game had dragooned him into neglecting his family, he conceded that he would be helpless to change were he offered his time again. His trade had taken over his life, but he wasn’t advocating or condoning it as a general truth for his colleagues or anyone else.

Nor did Shankly have to keep stating how much he enjoyed his job or acknowledging like most do now that he loved every aspect apart from the 90 minutes of each match, almost an entire profession preferring foreplay to consummation. The twinkle in his eye conveyed it as did the quips during the action to Reuben Bennett, Joe Fagan and Bob Paisley. He was a serious man and sometimes stern, not the walking aphorism machine of romantic myth, though he had a profound, homespun gift for inspiring his people and embodying the ideals they would be proud to have as their own.

It would be unfair to contrast Shankly’s charisma with today’s managers. He was a one-off and scores of his contemporaries were as grim-faced as their successors. It was back in the early 1960s, after all, that Barry Fantoni, Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook first chronicled the travails of tight-lipped, ashen-faced, Neasden FC supremo Ron Knee, 59, in Private Eye.

After winning the Double with Tottenham in 1961, Bill Nicholson was twitted good-naturedly by journalists for his grave demeanour, one speculating that he “shaved in ice water” and another that he laboured under the belief that “smiling takes up precious time”. You could hardly call Bertie Mee or Don Revie a barrel of laughs either but certainly the latter, in triumph, would be wreathed in effusive smiles while Joe Mercer and both Tommy Docherty and Brian Clough at their best were positively vivacious.

Ah, some may say, but think of the tension, the precariousness of their positions and the strain their ambition and professional pride places them under. One does not have to wish on them the experience of the great Australia all-rounder and combat pilot Keith Miller – “There's no pressure in Test cricket - real pressure is when you are flying a Mosquito with a Messerschmitt up your a---” – to provide them with some perspective.

Croesus-like rewards that not only enrich them but endow their families for generations to come, brigades of hand-picked support staff, the opportunity to make a positive, lasting impact on thousands of lives and the fact that, unlike so many, they are absorbed by a job they claim to cherish, should not necessarily bestow on them either merriment or serenity. It would not be appropriate – no one wants Norman Wisdom or the Laughing Cavalier doing the teamtalks.

But one wonders if the frequent touchline solemnity of almost every Premier League manager from Mauricio Pochettino and David Moyes to Sam Allardyce and Paul Lambert is a kind of conformity, an easy shorthand that demonstrates how deeply they care, just another optic like growing a beard or ditching the Ermenegildo Zegna for a tracksuit during a bad trot.

The strains of the job may be universal but their personalities are not - yet most managers now, even the most successful ones, stomp about sullenly and appear tormented for large parts of games as if besieged by conspirators. Even victory is treated like a vindication rather than a source of unpolluted joy. They roll their eyes contemptuously at banal questions and bridle at pointed ones. You can’t move for Holden Caulfields.

It’s as if there’s a game face that needs to be adopted by those labouring under the illusion that fans consider dourness an authentic manifestation of seriousness. Any levity – like Howard Wilkinson pretending to choke George Graham after a late Arsenal Cup-tie equaliser in 1991 or Louis van Gaal ‘diving’ in his technical area two years ago – might be mistaken for flippancy.

Jurgen Klopp shows that there is another way. You don’t need to search for clues to know how much he enjoys his job, it’s naked for all to see from the ferocity of his frustration to him breezily and exuberantly effing and jeffing after the corking victory over Manchester City on the most prudish platform of all, US network television. For him the touchline is no sterile promontory. Mirth has not forsaken him.

Football management is a difficult occupation but not a terrible one. Most of those at the top end have won life’s lottery and yet seem mired in misery. We know they are dutiful. We know they care. We also know they are the fortunate few in lucrative employment doing the thing they love most. Take off the masks and show your true selves.