Manchester United

[spud_gun]

https://twitter.com/MelissaReddy_/st...23526011359232

Can't recall Neville being so vociferous when Moyes and Van Gaal were subject to similar 'leaks' prior to their sackings.

[spud_gun]

"Not a sacking club"

[Saveloy]

They might, but he turned down Real in the summer so why the **** would he go there?

Aye, it's not a given. But I imagine they'd offer a lot more cash than Madrid.

[Leyton388]

[ame="https://youtu.be/CBEQ3tk9BD8"]Give it Giggsy till the end of the season - YouTube[/ame]

[baitman]

Dont they have to notify the stock excbange or some similar bollocks.

Moyes and neville dream team

[Fosterbloke]

Can you imagine a TV documentary about Man Utd like the Man City one if Giggs is in charge? Haha

[kingfunk]

YES!! United dismiss reports he will be sacked!!

[Fosterbloke]

YES!! United dismiss reports he will be sacked!!

Their players will have to try extra hard to get him sacked now!

[danperkins]

It doesn't matter who comes in, their backline is dire and the midfield is ****e. They have a few good attacking options and would probably benefit from a more positive manager, as would Pogba but whomever comes in will need to spend big to sort out their issues.... and at United they will get whatever money they want to spend.

My hope is that come the end of the season they aren't in champs league, so they won't get their targets once again. For the moment though, lets embrace their public squabbling and drama. Come on Rafa!

[Fosterbloke]

Is it me or is Lukaku getting bigger?

[dom9]

The parallels with United now and us in the 90s are striking aren't they.

From complete domination to utter dysfunction almost overnight.

The inability to move with the times. Once innovators, they're now the opposite. Struggling for ideas and direction. Unable to escape the shackles of the past nor the endless introspection.

It's almost all self inflicted.

[dom9]

Interesting article on punditry which I can't copy and paste from my phone.

The Voices in José Mourinho’s Head


Paul Scholes, one of several former Manchester United stars who now work as television pundits, has been a persistent critic of José Mourinho.Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

MANCHESTER, England — For once, José Mourinho bit his tongue. Ordinarily, he is not the type to let criticism slide, or to refrain from offering a rebuttal. But last Tuesday night, he resisted. “I’m not interested,” he said. His air was that of a man whose appetite for battle has been, at last, exhausted.

The issue — as it has been more than once in these last unhappy months at Old Trafford — was something one of Manchester United’s former players had said. This time — as it has been more than once — it was Paul Scholes, one of a cadre of recently retired legends now making a living as a television pundit, who said it.

Leading up to United’s drab, goal-less stalemate with Valencia in the Champions League earlier that day — the team’s fourth consecutive game without a victory — Scholes had suggested that Mourinho’s management was increasingly becoming “embarrassing” to the club.

The endless spats with current players — most notably Paul Pogba — and with United’s hierarchy, coupled with deflating results, Scholes said, meant that Mourinho was “lucky to have a job.”

Scholes has always made an unlikely pundit; he was famously averse to attention during his glittering playing career, rarely granting interviews, never courting the limelight. Yet he has proved something of a natural in his new role: frank, unafraid, straight to the point. Mourinho’s “mouth is out of control,” he said. He was “surprised” the Portuguese manager had survived last weekend’s defeat at West Ham United.

It was those comments that were put to Mourinho after the Valencia draw, by those searching for a stinging rebuke, and for the stirring of a rivalry. There have been plenty of those in the last few months: Mourinho, never one to shy away from conflict, has been in a state of open war with the ranks of English soccer’s vast punditocracy — those legions of former players now employed in the news media as observers and analysts and talking heads — almost from the moment he returned to the Premier League in 2013.


The former Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher, left, with Gary Neville, a former Manchester United star whose criticism of José Mourinho has brought pushback from the manager.Justin Finney/Getty Images

This year alone, he has: suggested Scholes criticized Pogba’s performances only because “Pogba made more money” than his predecessor in United’s midfield (January); bemoaned “hundreds” of pundits with “great background and knowledge in football” who were being “paid millions” but writing “things that are not true” (February); obliquely suggested that Gary Neville, a former United captain, was among those with an opinion who “could not resolve their own problems when they were managers” (March).

In May, Neville was in Mourinho’s sights again. “Some of the high-profile people in football have gone from players to weak and frustrated managers, and they return to football with the status of high-level pundits,” he said in an interview with the Portuguese outlet Record. “People remember more of what they were as players and not of what they were as managers. They are voices that influence public opinion.”

Mourinho, who took the summer off to appear as a pundit for RT, the Russian state broadcaster, during the World Cup, has been no less combative this season.

In September, he suggested that “some of the boys are really obsessed with me, and some of them have a problem, I think, with some compulsive lies” over his handling of Marcus Rashford, the young United and England forward.

Scholes’s most recent remarks should, really, have been the catalyst for the October entry for that ledger, but Mourinho would not take the bait. “I’m not interested,” he said, as soon as Scholes’s name was mentioned in his post-match news briefing. “I’m not interested,” he said, when the exact comments were relayed. “I’m not interested.”

It would be understandable if Mourinho had lost patience with this apparently bottomless well of criticism, this never-ending cycle of he said, he said (it is always a he). He is rarely, if ever, the instigator of any of these controversies; he is cursed, instead, always to be on the back foot. His detractors have the benefit of distance, and hindsight, too; he has pointed out, on several occasions, that nobody has ever lost a game from a television studio.

And yet it is hard to avoid the irony of Mourinho finding himself surrounded by a platoon of pundits, all of them laser-focused on his shortcomings. For a long time, after all, he felt that his teams suffered for underrepresentation in the media.

In the first season of his second spell at Chelsea, Mourinho complained that there were “lots of people in television, but not one of them is a Chelsea man.” He reeled off the list of former players associated with Liverpool — he has long nurtured an unmistakable disdain for Liverpool — and Manchester United. Those clubs, he argued, got an easier ride of it than Chelsea. “We do not have one,” he said.

A few weeks later, in an interview with the BBC, Mourinho offered a fuller explanation. He felt most pundits “are honest, and they do a professional job,” but that, in “doubtful situations,” they “can not hide the color of their hearts.” He wondered whether “a couple of Chelsea pundits” would be helpful, to address the imbalance.

Mourinho is not alone in feeling that this is the primary role of former players employed in the media: that they exist, largely, to defend the interests of the clubs they once represented.

That one-time Liverpool, United and Arsenal players — television fixtures like Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Jamie Redknapp and Ian Wright — dominate screen time has not gone unnoticed among their Premier League rivals. Many executives and managers feel those clubs receive preferential treatment because of it; or, more accurately, that their teams suffer for the lack of it.

Manchester City, for one, is hopeful that several members of its first Premier League-winning team will, once they retire, enter the studios to defend its corner; the club has approached Pablo Zabaleta, Vincent Kompany and Gareth Barry to assess their interest in doing media work.

Whether that plan will work is a different matter. The pundits themselves do not see their primary role as defending the interests of their former clubs; Mourinho might believe that they can not “forget the colors of their hearts,” but they say they make strenuous efforts to do just that.

“I’m always very conscious that, if I’m doing a Chelsea game, at least 50 percent of the audience does not want Chelsea to win,” said Graeme Le Saux, the former Chelsea defender who now works for NBC Sports. “I strive to be fair with criticism and fair with praise, to be objective and unbiased. That way, what you say carries more weight.”

NBC shares that view: Le Saux recalls that, on his first day with the company, its Premier League producer, Pierre Moossa, ran him through a list of various dos and don’ts of commentary: Don’t speculate on injuries, don’t cite sources unless you’re sure they’re credible. One of the most important, he said, was not to describe a former team as “we.”

“There is nothing worse than that,” Le Saux said. “That presentation was six years ago, and it has obviously stuck with me.”

If anything, according to Jamie Carragher, the former Liverpool defender now employed by Sky Sports, the temptation is to go the other way: to be more demanding, less easily pleased by the current efforts of your former club.

“I am very wary of being called biased,” he said. “You try not to think about it too much, and just say what you believe in, but you can go too far with criticism, or not far enough with praise, because you don’t want to be accused of being biased.”

Last season, Carragher found himself commentating on a couple of Liverpool games early on — “games when they had 70 percent of the ball and the opposition was just sitting in” — and later coming under fire for talking about Liverpool “too much.”

“Once you’ve said the other team is organized like this defensively, there wasn’t much else to add,” he said. “I remember being frustrated, and looking forward to doing other games, ones that were less dominated by one team.”

Perhaps Mourinho is experiencing a corollary of that desire by the pundits to prove detachment. Perhaps, Le Saux suggested, it is more heartfelt than that. “These players are seeing something they helped build fall away,” he said. It is not hard, certainly, to believe that Scholes and the rest take United’s travails extremely personally.

There is another, simpler truth, though. There is a way to draw the pundits’ sting, to blunt their weapons. “If you’re winning games and playing well, there’s nothing to worry about,” Le Saux said. Until Mourinho can find a way to do that, he will find that these battles keep coming, that the most damaging wounds continue to be inflicted by what feels like friendly fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/sports/manchester-united-mourinho-scholes.html#click=https://t.co/wokrB9yqpa

[Phoenix07]

They might, but he turned down Real in the summer so why the **** would he go there?

A proper opportunity to build a club, without any real restrictions in terms of budget. He can outline a real vision for them.

He's only 46, so he'd still have plenty of time to go to Real Madrid later in his career, as long as he succeeds at Man Utd.

Still think the best idea for them would be to hire Blanc until the end of the season, and give themselves some breathing space regarding a permanent appointment.

[Assassin]

Is it me or is Lukaku getting bigger?

He inherited all of Rooneys pie eating contracts

[Buzzo]

Man U would need to win 5-0 tonight I get to 8th position.

They need to turn it round rapidly. Even if the rumours aren’t true Jose can surely only be one or two defeats from the bullet?