Have no fear, Ole’s at the wheel!
The only problem with this is that he is still driving with ‘L’ plates on and he has no instructor!
Assisting him in his quest to at least keep the car going straight is Mike Phelan, whose managerial experience extends to a whole 3 months during which time he took Hull City to the brink of relegation before being replaced by Marco Silva who duly completed the task. (more…)
It’s official, the leaks have been plugged. With the arrival of Aaron Wan-Bissaka to replace old man Young and Harry Maguire to replace the average Jones/Smalling/Rojo and injury prone Bailly the Manchester United defence looks, on paper anyway, decidedly more solid than it did last season.
The downside is that football is, and has always been, a game best played on grass, not paper, so the proof of the pudding will only really be evident when United play Chelsea at Old Trafford in the season’s opener. (more…)
It would appear that Ed Woodward isn’t very well versed in the takeaway. No, not the Chinese kind, the sales kind. The one which appears to remove a particular tidbit from a deal only to reinstate it at a later date.
It’s like saying that your favourite car can be bought, is affordable but comes without electric windows. Then when you, the client, say that the only thing stopping you buying the car is the electric window issue, they can suddenly be included in the price. (more…)
It’s official! Ed Woodward really is an expert on football. This may come as a bit of a surprise to the vast majority of United fans, Louis van Gaal and all the ex-players who hang around Old Trafford these days. They think he is clueless. They think he keeps buying the wrong players and failing to buy the right ones.
Wrong! Ed knows what he is doing and disagreeing with the club’s most famous manager will prove that to be the case.
On the one occasion he probably should have disagreed with Sir Alex Ferguson, he didn’t, and David Moyes was appointed as manager. We all know how that one turned out. (more…)
So the season is all but over. We have now reached the time of year when, finally, Manchester United fans have something to look forward to. No longer must they suffer their team underperforming on the pitch. Some of those “players” may even be sold if anybody is clueless enough about football to actually buy them. The fact that Chris Smalling, Matteo Darmian, Phil Jones and Ashley Young are still there suggests that there aren’t as many clueless people around outside of Old Trafford as there used to be.
No, now is fast approaching the time when United fans can look forward to their “team” of transfer gurus underperforming OFF the pitch. These will include, probably for this gig only, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Mike Phelan, Michael Carrick, (because surely he must do something!), some fresh faced kid who looks like Phil Neville and good old uncle Ed overseeing things to make sure the club only overspends on galacticos they don’t need. (There may be a Director of Football involved but, as it has taken about six years for the club to even admit they need one, don’t hold your breath). (more…)
Manchester City will win the Premier League. Liverpool will finish second. That, at the moment, is all that is fair to assume as the other two slots available within the top four are being contested between teams who appear to be doing their utmost to hand the position to a rival.
Tottenham Hotspur were in a reasonably comfortable third position until they lost at their new home for the first time, beaten by West Ham. Their unbeaten home record must be one of the shortest in history! (more…)
Ed Woodward likes a superstar. He likes to associate with them and he likes, whenever possible, to buy one for the club. He is typical of one suffering from “little man” syndrome. He has power at Old Trafford, of that there is no doubt, but he wields it as many little men have done over the course of history, just without the violence.
He tends to be dictatorial as was shown by his immediate rush to recruit firstly Louis van Gaal and then José Mourinho after proving, to himself anyway, that following Sir Alex Ferguson’s advice with David Moyes wasn’t the way to go. (more…)
Having won his first five games in charge, albeit against opposition even one of Fergie’s first three replacements may have expected to beat, expectations are high at Old Trafford.
The fans, the real ones and the plastic, are starting to feel a sense of optimism about the future. It is not only the five wins which, as we said, weren’t achieved against the highest quality opponents, but it is the way in which they were achieved particularly the style of attacking football in the first four of those victories.
In beating Reading in the FA Cup after making nine changes and fielding a team who had never played a competitive game together, Solskjær showed he also has the knack of being able to find a winning team when selecting from a hotch-potch of players. (more…)
England’s superiority complex is what had held them back over the years. They have actually had some half-decent teams since winning the World Cup in 1966 but have usually gone out of tournaments meekly every time.
It is fair to say that this complex has become inverted and England have gone into most competitions expecting to be leaving for home early. They had, for many years, an inferiority complex, despite their supporters expecting them to win everything in which they have been involved for the last 52 years.
Now it is becoming clear as to why this has been happening. Using completely irrational logic they now think that LOSING a World Cup semi-final to a team ranked eight places below them in the world order is a successful tournament. (more…)
So what is it then? The players aren’t good enough? They are overpaid and lazy? The manager is not good enough? Would the players, for example, get away with this standard of performance if Sir Alex Ferguson was in charge?
Many excuses and reasons have been offered for the downturn in form of Manchester United. Remember also that this is José Mourinho’s third season and we all know what happened to him at Chelsea when he supposedly “lost” some of the players and was sacked.
There aren’t too many examples of what has happened to him in the third season at other clubs but that is mainly because he usually only sticks around for two. (more…)
