the chosen one banner, up for sale on ebay.
disclaimer; it may not be the genuine one!
disclaimer; it may not be the genuine one!
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removing all the weak links makes us stronger
too many gutless players, no beef or desire. pussies everywhere... sack them all. -
Another MASSIVE game
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5,000 Nectar points too!Football without Origi is nothingComment
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David Moyes was openly sneered and sniggered at by Manchester United stars
As if immediate memories of a 2-0 defeat by the worst team left in the Champions League were not enough to darken the mood on the Manchester United flight home from Athens in February, the sight of David Moyes’s reading material was enough to prompt further shaking of heads.
A management self-help guide called Good to Great was Moyes’s choice after his team’s 2-0 defeat by Olympiacos that we now know was the tipping point of the Scot’s dismal reign at Old Trafford.
The book was noted by Moyes’s players, the reaction predictable.
We are the Premier League champions,’ said one source from that flight. ‘Why on earth did our manager need to read a book to learn how to manage us?’
Moyes may have been United’s ‘Chosen One’ but to most of his players, the former Everton manager was never the right one. At times their disregard for him was startling.
In January when Moyes took his team to Dubai on a training break, he allowed them a night out.
Some players rewarded him by returning at 5am, waking other guests.
When Shinji Kagawa — never trusted by Moyes — arrived so late for the flight to Munich this month that he had to be fast-tracked through departures by United’s security staff he did so with a fixed smile on his face hinting that he really did not care.
As Moyes’s day of reckoning drew close recently, meanwhile, three unused players sat in the stand at one game and began to place bets on just how long their beleaguered manager would survive.
Privately, Moyes now knows that he got some things wrong. He knows he was too cautious, too pragmatic. He hated the ‘Chosen One’ banner draped in his honour at the Stretford End, feeling it implied the job had been gifted rather than earned.
He wanted to impose his own personality on his squad and accepts now that it was too soon, that a softer approach was required.
At training, United’s players soon became disenchanted with his sessions.
They found them boring. One coach appointed by Moyes was referred to as ‘F*** Off (insert name here)’, simply because that was what some players felt like saying when he started talking.
Nor was the disaffection and the disloyalty restricted to the training ground. Towards the end of that game in Athens, for example, Moyes found himself arguing with the fourth official.
‘Send him off,’ came one voice from among the substitutes. ‘We would be better off without him.’ A clear act of insubordination, it astonished those who heard it — but it was not an isolated incident.
One theme of United’s recent season, for example, has been the leaking of team news to a national newspaper. Having established which young player was responsible, Moyes admonished him but to this day the leaks continue.
In the dressing room they just were not listening and those who have been around United for some time quickly drew an obvious conclusion. None of this would have been allowed to continue under Sir Alex Ferguson.
When Kieran Richardson, now at Fulham, turned up at an airport wearing a beanie hat, for example, Ferguson tore it from his head. When he suspected team news leaks two seasons ago, Ferguson began to confiscate mobile phones on match day.
It was draconian management but it worked. Under Moyes, the niggles just continued to niggle.
He could not stem the flow of problems and if an impression is forming here of a squad of renegades running riot around Carrington, then it must be said that at times Moyes did not help himself. At times, for a manager of 15 years’ experience, the 50-year-old could be astonishingly naive.
Back in winter, for example, Moyes found himself constantly fending off questions about his relationship with Robin van Persie and Rio Ferdinand.
In public, he insisted the stories were untrue, a strategy that might have worked if he had not sat with a fellow Premier League manager after one game and torn strips off both.
Ferdinand, for his part, got to hear of the conversation and, at a stroke, another relationship lay in pieces. Every club have their problems, of course. Moyes, though, appeared to bring some of them on himself.
A decent, honest man, the pressure of life at United could make him appear curt — even the ground staff at Old Trafford did not like him — while his decision to tell two midfield players they could leave the club in January seemed extraordinary, given his lack of playing resources at that time.
To this day, one of those players is in the United team.
Certainly, the first-team squad will not miss their departed manager.
Tales of Moyes’s difficulties at Old Trafford serve as a salutary tale of modern management. If you do not get results your employees can make you or break you.
Somewhere in Moyes’s big red self-help manual, there is probably a paragraph about that.Thanks very much for being ‘This Mornings’ Farmer’Comment
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David Moyes's reign at Manchester United was ended after senior players went running to Sir Alex Ferguson pushing for a change
- David Moyes sacked as Manchester United manager
- United players are believed to have visited former manager Sir Alex Ferguson pushing for a change after an abysmal season
- Ferguson played a major part in appointing Moyes his successor
- Moyes lost the trust of several senior United players
As David Moyes’s reign unravelled on Monday, tales emerged of senior Manchester United players beating a path to the door of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Cheshire home to urge their old manager to push for change.
The message was clear: they no longer stood by Moyes and neither should United if the empire Ferguson built was not going to continue crumbling, brick by brick.
There was no more staunch a supporter of Moyes than his fellow Scot. After all, it was Ferguson who had called the Everton manager away from a shopping trip with his wife, Pamela, to that same address in Wilmslow to offer him the job last May when the ill-fated legend of ‘The Chosen One’ was born.
‘To be honest, it was done when Alex said but it was good for me to meet David and hear his ideas and plans,’ claimed United chief Ed Woodward in an interview last October, in what could now be seen as an attempt to distance himself from the appointment as the storm clouds gathered. ‘Without the recommendation of Alex there may have been a different process.’
Moyes reminded us of that episode last Friday, at what proved to be his final pre-match press conference, as he revisited the story of his departure from Everton.
It was never going to be an easy transition. When Ferguson stood on the Old Trafford turf as United boss for the last time on that May day and urged supporters to back the new manager through good times and bad — even before his successor had been confirmed — he could see trouble ahead.
It is a sign of just how much Ferguson is revered that the fans obeyed him through the most wretched of seasons, even when the banner dedicated to Moyes in the Stretford End became a focal point of contention and then embarrassment and rebel planes started circling overhead.
They never forgot how Ferguson survived and then thrived in the early Nineties and hoped Moyes would somehow follow a similar road to redemption. Without their patience and understanding, he would have been toast some time ago.
But when Ferguson himself became the target for their anger in recent weeks, when Moyes openly questioned the squad that he had inherited, and Ferguson’s final act as manager was suddenly threatening to taint all that had gone before, enough was enough.
As if an increasingly bleak future under Moyes wasn’t bad enough, the whole mess was in danger of casting a cloud over their glorious past.
The comparisons with Sir Matt Busby and Wilf McGuinness 44 years ago have become quite uncanny.
Moyes is a good man, a proud man, and someone who hasn’t turned into a bad coach overnight. But Ferguson cast a long shadow and it was one he never came close to escaping.
As much as Moyes benefited from his predecessor’s support, there is no doubt Ferguson’s achievements became a weight around his neck, his presence a distraction.
Moyes insisted Ferguson was an occasional presence, always helpful but never intrusive; that his aura around the club was not a problem. He may think differently in hindsight.
At least McGuinness didn’t have to sit through every match at Old Trafford facing a stand bearing the name of the legend he had replaced, while modern television has enabled cameras to zoom in on Ferguson’s expression every time Moyes suffered a setback — and there were far too many of those for comfort
Every time another black mark appeared on his record, it was compared unfavourably with the man he replaced.
A post-mortem into United’s failings this season was never complete without mention of how Moyes had done away with Ferguson’s entire backroom team last summer.
Ryan Giggs joined the coaching staff, a nod to the Ferguson dynasty, but his opinion was rarely sought and barely valued.
Giggs became an increasingly despondent figure and when two of Fergie’s ‘Class of 92’, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville, criticised Moyes’s team and signings on television last month it was a sign the old guard were in rebellion.
Stalwarts of the Ferguson era, such as Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand, had long since lost faith in Moyes.
Robin van Persie made it clear from the outset he was unhappy with the change. Danny Welbeck, one of the bright young things Ferguson left behind, now wants out. Others simply lost direction and heart.
Sir Alex was aware of the unrest. His players made sure of that when they took the issue to his front door.
Having been so instrumental in Moyes’s appointment, it is unclear what part Ferguson played in the decision to call time or how hard he fought to save him when the Glazer family and Woodward lost patience.
Ultimately, though, it was his legacy that stood to suffer from this whole sorry affair.Thanks very much for being ‘This Mornings’ Farmer’Comment
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Wow. In the Times...
Sacked Manchester United manager was scorned during loss to Olympiacos
Piraeus, February 25. There were only seconds left of Manchester United’s wretched 2-0 defeat by Olympiacos in the first leg of their Champions League round-of-16 tie when David Moyes began remonstrating with the fourth official. Out of the United manager’s earshot, but loud enough it seemed for Steve Round, Moyes’s assistant, to hear, came a shout from a disgruntled player — “Send him off, we’d be better off”. On the substitutes’ bench, there were astonished glances. Had they really just heard that?
About 20 minutes earlier, his team trailing and flailing, Moyes had signalled his intention to bring on Marouane Fellaini up front, a final, desperate throw of the dice to salvage something from the game and avert more acute embarrassment. It was a gut instinct, yet one that was met with immediate concern from Ryan Giggs, the player-coach, who felt that hoofing the ball long to the Belgium midfielder was not the way to go about trying to rescue things. Moyes relented.
The pressure that night must have been intense — indeed, it was the moment that signalled the beginning of the end for Moyes — but the incidents are instructive, the first for underlining the extent of the dressing-room discontent, the second for highlighting the indecision that was a recurring theme during the manager’s miserable ten months in charge.
It has been said that Moyes lost the dressing room, but that is not strictly true. He never really had it, and as the weeks turned into months, the misgivings and dissatisfaction only grew. The overwhelming feeling, which took hold long before that chastening night in Greece, was that he was a decent man who was out of his depth.
The irony is that it required him to lose his job before he found his true voice — Moyes was said to have cut an impressive, forthright figure in his farewell address to the players at the club’s Carrington headquarters yesterday.
There had been moments before when he had caught the players’ full attention, notably when telling them during a furious tirade after the FA Cup third-round defeat at home to Swansea City in January that they were “not fit to wear the shirt”, but not enough. Tellingly, the mood was vastly more upbeat during the first post-Moyes training session, which was led by Giggs and Nicky Butt.
For all the frustration with the one-dimensional tactics and the inherent caution, little dismayed the players as much as Moyes’s poor squad management and mixed messages. Some were overused to the point of fatigue and then barely seen again for weeks, others chronically under-used only suddenly to be hurried in from the cold in emergency situations.
Nor was there any consistency of selection. Rio Ferdinand started seven of United’s opening eight matches of the season then hardly featured for the next 4½ months. The defender’s appearance on that night against Olympiacos was only his third start in 17 matches, and how it showed. Danny Welbeck, Shinji Kagawa, Ashley Young, Javier Hernández and Darren Fletcher all encountered similar treatment.
Tom Cleverley started eight games in just 24 days from mid-December, but when tired legs contributed to him giving away a penalty in the last of those matches — against Sunderland in the Capital One Cup — the England midfielder was barely seen for another 3½ weeks.
At least two players went to see Moyes to complain about a lacking of playing time. They were told if they didn’t like it he would not stand in their way this summer. Others felt he was unable to restore their confidence or ensure those on the periphery felt included.
Under Sir Alex Ferguson, players were accustomed to being told the team the night before a game. Moyes tended to wait until the pre-match meeting three hours before kick-off before naming his and the substitutes only 90 minutes before the game. Mentally, the players felt they needed longer to prepare, a frustration articulated by Ferdinand. “You spend a lot of nervous energy thinking, ‘Am I playing, am I not playing?’ ” he said. “Keep just going round in circles in your head, enough to turn you into a madman.”
Moyes would be the first to reject suggestions that he was harder on the younger players than the senior ones. Yet the decision to discipline Welbeck, Young and Cleverley for a late night out in Manchester — 24 hours after the club’s elimination by Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-finals — even though the players had been granted four days off and not broken any rules, seemed strange given what had transpired only a few weeks earlier.
On that occasion, a player turned up about an hour late for training looking worse for wear, but no punishment was believed to have been forthcoming. Was there also an overindulgence of Robin van Persie, with whom there were rumours — always denied — of fallouts and disagreements?
Dressing rooms are no different to offices — some colleagues get on, others don’t — but by the end it was noted that certain potentially divisive cliques were beginning to develop.
Back to Piraeus. On the plane home, Moyes was spotted with a copy of Good to Great — Why Some Companies Make The Leap . . . And Others Don’t, a management book by Jim Collins. It was fitting — a good manager trying yet failing to make the jump to becoming a great one.
Once at Manchester airport, a posse of photographers were waiting to take Moyes’s picture. The colour seemed to drain instantly from his face once he spotted them and, motioning to his father, David Sr, next to him, he could not disappear from view quickly enough. Ultimately, the immensity of it all was just too much.
The choosing ones: the men responsible for selecting Moyes’s successor
Joel and Avram Glazer
The United co-chairmen will sanction the final decision over the new manager, although they are likely to be heavily guided by their executive team.
Ed Woodward
The former City of London accountant is the club’s executive vice-chairman. He has been criticised in some quarters but he will be responsible for spearheading the recruitment process.
Sir Alex Ferguson
David Moyes’s failure has reflected badly on Ferguson, who personally appointed his fellow Scot, but it has not dissuaded the club from continuing to seek his advice.
David Gill
The highly regarded former chief executive and a senior figure at Uefa is considered one of the game’s foremost administrators with a firm understanding of the sport and his opinion will be listened to.
Sir Bobby Charlton
The former United and England player had been the only director to come out in support of Moyes in recent weeks. Not as influential as he once was but still admired.
Ryan Giggs
The Welshman has been placed in temporary charge until the end of the season, and is not in the running to get the job permanently and is unlikely to be consulted over Moyes’s successor. A hugely influential figure among the squad.Thanks very much for being ‘This Mornings’ Farmer’Comment
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Jeez, it's turning in to a bit of a free-for-all.
I want the story of video footage of Leon Osman and Phil Jagielka shown to certain players to be true. If that could make an appearance, that would be great.Comment
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Just shows what cunts these prima donna footballers are
Moyes didn't help himself at all but these cunts deserve a lot of the blame for their season
They're in for a shock with van Gaal / Ancelotti
CuntsWhat do you mean it could've been anyone? Name me one person who's got a grudge against penguins
Batman
F*** off!!!Comment
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What footage is that?Polymetal Allooyy
Xbox Live: BooshankerComment
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It is **** that players who take fans' hard earned money just decide they cant be bothered and are practically willing to write off a season because they dont like the manager.Comment
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That a Manchester United midfielder was shown video footage of Leon Osman and told to learn from his movement, etc.Originally posted by jonnygrunter View Post
Then there was a story of a Manchester United defender being shown footage of Phil Jagielka being told the same.
Much like the chicken and the egg, nobody is sure which came first but I choose to believe that one story is true and the other is just the same **** re-hashed.Comment
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If only my office worked that way…Comment
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The Osman one was a joke, but the story of Moyes telling Ferdinand to watch what Jagielka does is trueOriginally posted by Muddled View Post
Thanks very much for being ‘This Mornings’ Farmer’Comment
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