Your local rivals have turned the Premier League into an almost meaningless farce. We are questioning the validity of anything we’ve seen over the past 20 years; wondering how many goals Erling Haaland will get in the Championship. We are looking at the league table from second position down and wishing we’d invested in inflatable bananas a month ago.
And yet here comes the Old Trafford machine: from players to the captain to the manager to the director of football, to the director of the director of football, to a minority owner who feels the UK is being “colonised by immigrants”, to debt-leveraging majority owners who take vast sums out of the club and are collectively saying hold my Ineos-sponsored high-performance wellness immune boost smoothie. Yes, it’s time to dust down the Manchester United bin-fire article. Read this and compare and contrast.
From 11 August 2022: “Reds rinse and repeat: will we ever break the Manchester United crisis cycle?” There are others. It is some feat to be more newsworthy than Manchester City, even for an evening. The defeat in Como wasn’t surprising.
We’re getting to the stage where the large pieces of furniture Barney Ronay keeps comparing Harry Maguire to are fighting back. @19thCenturyArmoire: “mate i’m a hundred and sixty years old, of course my legs have gone.” @CoffinFridge69: “#BeKind Ronay, appliances have feelings too.” Everyone knows the problems at Old Trafford lie deeper than the defensive line held by Maguire and Matthijs de Ligt on Wednesday. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Bruno Fernandes’s constant on-field complaining spilled off the pitch. An exercise in throwing his manager under the bus, where presumably Michael Carrick found Jason Wilcox, still lying in hiding under the 250 to the Trafford Centre after Lisandro Martínez’s post-match intervention in Madrid.
Carrick did push back on the criticism: “Whatever system you play, whatever tactics you play, if you don’t run, and you don’t run forward, and you don’t run back, you aren’t going to win.” But it’s hard to throw someone under the bus when you’re already under the bus you’re trying to throw people under. Poor Carrick, who may well be gone by the time I finish this tram ride, never mind by the time you get around to reading this. It was one of those funereal press conferences: Carrick being as earnest as it is possible to be, while journalists take it in turn to sound even more earnest, as if they’re questioning a man who’s just failed to blow up the asteroid coming to destroy the Earth.
At this rate, that meteor will arrive long before United have recaptured past glories. Ineos presumably has a big blame pie chart constantly updating on a PowerPoint. Spin the wheel – who’s to blame today?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
