You probably wouldn’t even get suspended on boards.ie it’s so bad.
I am a legend of Boards.ie.
I wouldn’t brag about that.
I am one of the top top moderators over there as well.
1 Like
I don’t know how you get the time…
I do wonder the same about yourself tbh.
Seriously, do you know what the point of Ferguson is at united?
I think it’s history repeating itself - Matt Busby at Utd in the early 70s and Shankly at Liverpool in the mid 70s. Someone has to go to Ferguson and say “we need you out in order to move on as a club” but who’s going to do it? Whatever chance you had a couple of years ago but after his health scare it’s hard to see it happening.
Its incredible that its been let happen. Its so obvious he is the culture problem in the Club, far worse than the Glazers, his role in propping up their regieme constantly overlooked. Nero himself.
1 Like
Manchester United has become the place where talent goes to die
Players inject some short-term positivity before stagnating – the club needs a training ground coach who can develop individuals
CHIEF FOOTBALL CORRESPONDENT
8 March 2022 • 7:30am
Man City targeted Manchester United right-back Aaron Wan-Bissaka CREDIT: AP
The most obvious sign of success for a football club is winning matches. The second clearest sign is improving players. Plainly both tend to go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately for Manchester United neither has happened.
Never before has a club spent so much money to, at the very best, stand still. And given their stunning levels of spending, it means United have effectively gone backwards.
However much they have tried to convince themselves about ‘re-boots’, ‘projects’ and ‘direction of travel’ there are no tangible signs of progress. Of all their failings the greatest indictment, greater than not winning enough games or trophies, is the inability to improve any of the players they have bought. Not one.
Such sweeping statements are there to be knocked down but, honestly, where is the evidence to the contrary? The truth is that regardless of who it is - whether it be expensive signings, free transfers or academy graduates - not one is better or more valuable than when their arrival was announced.
Advertisement
The latest hope is Anthony Elanga who has become something of a project for interim manager Ralf Rangnick. Hopefully the 19-year-old winger will go on to have an illustrious career at Old Trafford but, maybe, he will be another Adnan Januzaj who was equally championed by David Moyes: a good player but ultimately not good enough for United.
Louis Van Gaal promoted Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford, and Jose Mourinho hitched himself to Scott McTominay, but have any of them fulfilled their potential? There has to be question marks over whether McTominay will ever be quite good enough, and Rashford is a genuine star, but has gone backwards of late. Lingard, meanwhile, has barely featured, played his best football on loan to West Ham United last season and will leave on a free this summer. All three suffer from the accusation levelled at successive United managers: where is the work invested to improve these players?
The scrutiny on the signings should be even more intense. That is where the real guilt lies and it presents a shocking picture of waste, negligence, mis-management, maybe even disinterest and fundamentally bad coaching.
Marcus Rashford is just one Man Utd player to suffer an alarming slump in form CREDIT: Getty Images
Let us take United’s 10 most expensive signings of all time. They were all bought since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 for a collective cost of around £571million – from Paul Pogba at £89million all the way through to Juan Mata for £40million. Who has improved at United? Not Pogba or Mata, that is for sure. Ditto Harry Maguire, Fred and Aaron Wan-Bissaka, who all struggled so badly at Manchester City on Sunday, and likewise Angel Di Maria and Anthony Martial, who have both now left. Jadon Sancho has also not improved thus far, although there is still time for him. The only one for whom a case can be made is Bruno Fernandes, but even his form has nosedived this season, to the extent that he is lucky to be in the team at all.
The question, of course, is why? How can a club have such an appalling hit rate not just on signings but on developing players and on the fundamentals of coaching? It is not just that they are failing to improve them but that they are actually getting worse: it is the opposite of exploiting potential. There is a stagnation at the heart of the club that is infecting it to its core.
When United signed Wan-Bissaka in 2019 Crystal Palace benchmarked his £50million fee – with £45million upfront – against the similar amount Manchester City paid for their right-back, Kyle Walker, and even argued that Wan-Bissaka was more valuable because he was younger.
United, for their part, trumpeted the deal and claimed that Wan-Bissaka stood out from a database of 804 right-backs compiled by the club’s 15-strong analytics team. Wan-Bissaka, so the theory went, fitted the profile of a young player, preferably British and, given the way Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wanted his defence to push up, one that was also good at so-called recovery runs.
And now? Wan-Bissaka is nowhere near being in the top 10 right-backs eligible to play for England, never mind being remotely close to Gareth Southgate’s squad. He was targeted remorselessly by City on Sunday, and with good reason.
So what is going on? United actually appear to have a deluded belief that they bring young players through and improve them. One reason cited for not hiring Antonio Conte as their manager, after Solskjaer was finally sacked, was because they argued he only wanted “pre-programmed” older players and would marginalise their younger ones. But it just laid bare again that United do not have a coherent strategy.
Who at United has coached? Moyes will claim he did not have time as he battled with the burden of succeeding Sir Alex Ferguson, it is claimed Jose Mourinho did not and it appears that Solskjaer could not. The story goes that when Rashford went to see Solskjaer to express his concerns about his form, the position he was playing and the need for more coaching he was told to stop “moaning”.
Conversely when Graham Potter was informed that Brighton could not bring in another striker his response was that he would work with what he has and find a solution. Guardiola has managed for two seasons at City without a centre-forward. That is what coaches do.
There are other factors. As with England a few years ago the United shirt undoubtedly weighs heavy on the shoulders of the players. They shrink when they wear it. Who puffs out his chest? The pre-match photograph before they were beaten by Wolverhampton Wanderers in January has become infamous for how defeated they looked before kick-off.
At the same time, when have United made a ‘clever’ signing in the past few years? Where is their equivalent to, for example, the £8million that Liverpool paid for Andrew Robertson from Hull City?
There is not one single one. Instead they have paid top dollar, often way over the odds, for obvious signings which makes their failure to improve them – or even for them to maintain the form that earned them the move - yet more damning.
It also makes the need for their next manager to be someone who wants to get out on the grass and improve his squad, and take control of the training ground, ever more compelling.
9 Likes
Very good article.
Thats all they need, someone else to come in, and turn the entire tide once again. Another 3 year plan.
That’s why I shared it pal
1 Like
Only real energy at United the apparently bottomless well of dismay
Sideshow of outrage continues but in reality after 20 great years the team has been poor for nine
Barney Ronay
about 18 hours ago
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”
Yes I would. I would probably do that. It becomes easier to say this with certainty, to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence – which might previously have seemed a little lateral, lacking in, say, the directness that makes the Premier League so special – having watched Sky Sports coverage of Sunday’s Manchester derby; and having seen Dave Jones turn to Roy Keane at the final whistle, with a sense even here of basic existence-fatigue and ask: “Roy. How would you sum up that half?”
As the caption Roy Keane: unbeaten in all 14 derbies with Manchester City scrolled beneath his beard-line, Keane paused. Can I say that he looked tired? That behind his eyes, the great anti-bluffer knew that he too was in danger of lapsing into muscle memory and learned response.
Roy didn’t fake it. He didn’t confect imaginary adrenaline. He said that United’s players basically gave up, and not much more. And by the end it felt like a moment to ask: are the great days of people saying Manchester United are bad already gone? People saying that Manchester United are bad was a glorious thing. We will always have those sunlit memories, back when people saying Manchester United are bad was fresh and new.
But you have to say, we expect a bare minimum of effort, of cinematic rage and Tweetable clips. Perhaps we need to dig deep and look at the whole structure of people saying Manchester United are bad.
Because by this stage we have surely reached a tipping point in this fascination with the everyday decline of a poorly managed football club. Zoom out and United’s season is unremarkable. Fifth in the league, with a couple of minor cup runs: this looks about right given the squad and the coaching resources.
Exactly which combination of Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ralf Rangnick, Fred, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and an aged celebrity striker is supposed to guarantee elite-tier success?
And yet the wheel of rage continues to revolve, to the extent the only really interesting thing about Manchester United right now is how unhappy people are about Manchester United. The most powerful element, the only real energy at the club, is that apparently bottomless well of dismay.
It is worth noting this is not by chance. Good salespeople are endlessly adaptable. When life gives you a bad football team: make bad football team-ade. And so United’s non-success has become the product, a self-sustaining media industry in its own right.
At the end of another unremarkable defeat we await impatiently the real match around the lighted coffee table, the cut-aways, the memes, the pornography of legend-rage.
Gary’s rant. Micah’s laugh. Scholsey’s pucker of disdain. This is where the eyeballs are now, the clicks, the money. Done with feasting on the flesh we are now down to gnawing the bones and sucking out the marrow. What, you wonder, will be left at the end?
There are two things worth saying about this. First, no useful purpose is served here. This is not good for the Premier League, or good for how we consume this thing. There is a general principle that grandiose failure is more interesting than efficient success. Stories about non-tortured genius or unflawed heroes rarely catch the imagination.
Hence Manchester City winning is harder to describe in an interesting way than Manchester United losing. Describing why and how City are good, the way a team of seven technically sublime midfielders set to a wonderfully grooved plan can always create overlaps and space: this is less grabby, less operatic.
Interesting failure
But that United obsession will also eat itself. The current mode of TV analysis is to throw a lighted circle around a player who isn’t running and say things like: look at him. He’s not running. And from there to talk about character and essence, to suggest the explanation for Manchester United not being better than teams with better players and better management is something deep and rotten, something that will, in the end, reward our fascination.
In reality this is not interesting failure. It’s not grand or thwarted or pure. It is easily explained. Compare the team lists from Sunday. Is it really surprising that City should go on to win 4-1?
Or that City’s method, which is designed to exhaust and demoralise, should ultimately do both to an inferior team? Run it through the computer. Simulate these known qualities. This is what you’d get.
Carelessly run from the top, United have become a flaccid on-field entity, all weird succession and disjointed recruitment, with no obvious winning method among the many tiers of management blokes currently filling the gap between coach and board. At the end of which Wan-Bissaka is trying to defend against Phil Foden and João Cancelo, who are simply better players with a better plan. And Harry Maguirestands accused once again of being somehow deliberately, consciously bad.
Maguire is of course just a symptom. Before moving to this impossibly demanding environment he had played in the Premier League 69 times for Leicester and 32 times for Hull. Aged 29, he still hasn’t won a trophy. Maybe Maguire is just good but not great – a little overexposed, but also bedraggled now, scrambled and beaten down by the extraordinary levels of ambient unhappiness, the constant dissection, the theatrical punditry rage.
And this is the other thing. This loss of scale is above all bad for Manchester United. Take a step back and it isn’t much of a leap to conclude the rotating chorus of despairing legends may just be part of the problem. This is a club that remains in thrall to its own past, but which is still able to retail that iconography; and still able to find a market for those grave old Easter Island heads, out there feasting on the bones of the present.
How much harder to move forward while every public projection is still being broadcast from the land of Fergie; and while decline and falling short, the reproaches of the glorious past, is always the story.
Manchester United were great for just over 20 years. They’ve been bad for nine. How long will it take? When does angst and agony become the defining note? Why, you wonder, might those players feel their shoulders tense, the world closing in? Why do they look demoralised? We’ll be back after the break for more from the panel on that.
2 Likes
It’ll be One league title in ten years soon. That just isn’t good enough at a big club.
Ferguson will hang around for his state funeral, and then the fortunes will change.
Barney needs to lighten up.
United need a manager that’ll steady the ship for a while
2 Likes
United need a to lock Ferguson out of the premises.