Move that Dope

Just a quick word that I've moved over here - manutdmediawatch.wordpress.com - for no other reason than a change is as good as a rest...

Master of Puppets

When Van Gaal was first appointed as manager - and again now, in his first weeks in charge - I was reminded of this quote from Lacan on the uprisings of 1968:

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master.  You will get one. 

Which I argue can be applied to footballers thus:

What you aspire to as footballers is a new master.  You will get one.

Which is to say that the void created by Sir Alex's retirement had to be filled, and that when it became apparent that Moyes was not the man to do this, for whatever reason, the players were lost.  It could have been a chance for a glorious experiment in socialist democracy, they could've created a free-thinking commune where everyone takes reponsibility and they band together and overcome everything.  Instead, they disappeared.  They hid until Moyes had been pelted out of the job.
And now they have what they want again.  A glorious leader. The authoritarian, masterful Van Gaal, who can come and tell them what to do.
And all is right with the world.

Perhaps the difference between them can be found in the adage that if you have to resort to anger and violence you have immediately lost power - Lear futilely shouting at the elements - and that the master is the one who perpetually holds it in reserve.  Van Gaal has not had to demonstrate his power, it is there, an aura around him.  One does not imagine that Moyes' aura was quite the same, and his hairdryer, one imagines, was probably not the most terrifying thing on earth...

Reflections

(It's that time of year where I vow to myself that I'll get back to blogging on the regular and I write a couple of things and then disappear again.  Maybe this time it'll take... Actually thinking of revamping the look and suchlike but we'll see. Time related issues rather than lack of footballing enthusiasms are generally what stops me, a guy has to make a living and there's only so many hours in a day...)

Not Man Utd related but I just wanted to comment on Jack Wilshire's recent comments on his being photographed smoking.  Footballers are not renowned for their intelligent words- interviews full of cliché being the norm - but here we have words from Wilshire so utterly empty and banal that they go out other end and come back into the world of interesting.

Here is what he said, as quoted by the BBC:

"Of course I regret it," he said. "It's unacceptable and I will accept the consequences and move on. I've been seen before doing it," he said. "I said then I made a mistake and I have made a mistake again. People make mistakes. I'm young and I'll learn from it. I realise the consequences it has and the effect on kids growing up. I have kids myself and I don't want them growing up to think their dad smokes and it's OK for a footballer to smoke because it's not. This is a big season for me," he said. "I came back early to pre-season to show people my commitment. I am fully committed to the club and to my job and I want to show everyone that. Over the past few seasons I've had a few injuries. This season I'm looking to have a really great pre-season and get a really good base of fitness and take that in to the season."

The first thing we notice is just what an absolute crock of shit he talks. It's all just so many words, absolutely disconnected from his actual being - I like to imagine him speaking dead-eyed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style.  The whole thing basically screams drones, "I do not give a fuck."

Which frankly would be OK wouldn't it?  If he just either didn't say a thing about it - it was a cigarette for fucks sake - or just said, "Yeah, I had a drag.  And...?" Then the whole thing could be handled in house and everyone would be happy.

Wilshire's words link into the reflexivity of the modern world - that our actions are no longer simply actions, everything is over-determined, every act is conditioned by any number of narratives that we can pick and choose between, and consequently, if something goes wrong, we can be spared any responsibilty.

Zizek (as ever) elaborates further here:

Perhaps the best example of the universalised reflexivity of our lives is the growing inefficiency of interpretation. Traditional psychoanalysis relied on a notion of the unconscious as the ‘dark continent’, the impenetrable substance of the subject’s being, which had to be probed by interpretation: when its content was brought to light a liberating new awareness would follow. Today, the formations of the unconscious (from dreams to hysterical symptoms) have lost their innocence: the ‘free associations’ of a typical educated patient consist for the most part of attempts to provide a psychoanalytic explanation of his own disturbances, so we have not only Annafreudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian interpretations of the symptoms, but symptoms which are themselves Annafreudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian – they don’t exist without reference to some psychoanalytic theory. The unfortunate result of this reflexivisation is that the analyst’s interpretation loses its symbolic efficacy and leaves the symptom intact in its idiotic jouissance. It’s as though a neo-Nazi skinhead, pressed to give reasons for his behaviour, started to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood.

The first bit of this might seem a little irrelevant, but the point is simply that no one is free from this reflexivity, in our example, footballers know the import of their comments, they know precisely what the media will expect them to say, what their club will want them to say, how what they say will be received.  So the words they speak are no accurate reflection of their thoughts, instead they are a reflection of what they think they should think, and thus the words have no real meaning to the footballer, no real connection to his behaviour. The second part makes this point more explicit: all the explanations for society's problems on a macro level become an excuse for one's own behaviour on a micro level.

The result? Zizek again:

‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my gun,’ Goebbels is supposed to have said. ‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my cheque-book,’ says the cynical producer in Godard’s Le Mépris. A leftist slogan inverts Goebbels’s statement: ‘When I hear the word “gun”, I reach for culture.’ Culture, according to that slogan, can serve as an efficient answer to the gun: an outburst of violence is a passage à l’acte rooted in the subject’s ignorance. But the notion is undermined by the rise of what might be called ‘Post-Modern racism’, the surprising characteristic of which is its insensitivity to reflection – a neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up black people knows what he’s doing, but does it anyway.

Isn't this what we see in Wilshire's "I'm young"? It has become an excuse for an all-knowing stupidity - "yes, I know that it's wrong but I'm young, I'll learn."  Being young means there's no reason to reflect on one's mistakes,  In Wilshire's case we see this taken to its ridiculous extreme - "I said then I made a mistake and I have made a mistake again. People make mistakes. I'm young and I'll learn from it."  I made a mistake then - I've made the same mistake again, I've learnt nothing in between, but this time, this time I will learn, I'm young, older than when I made that first mistake, but still young.

Imagine the same attitude on the pitch, "That cross was rubbish? I'm still young, they'll improve," rather than, "That cross was rubbish? I know, and I'm going to keep working at it, keep practising crossing until my crossing improves."

The Queen is Dead

A few quick thoughts on the sacking of David Moyes.

1)  He never really recovered from last summer, a sense of doom pervaded before a ball had even been kicked with him as manager.  A summer of transfer inactivity compounded by shambolic attempts at signing players, both actual and perceived, and coming out the other side with nothing but an over-priced Fellaini to show for it, was hardly the way to launch a new era on the front foot.

2) In hindsight, was it really wise to simply rubber-stamp Sir Alex's choice of manager? At the time it seemed like it was aiding continuity - the master chooses his apprentice - and everyone (barring the usual suspects who moan even when we're winning,"Well, the treble was ok but did we really have to leave it so late, should have changed it up after 60 minutes...") had a warm fuzzy feeling inside,"this is how Man Utd do things, not like those other classless clubs..."

3) Which raises the question of when, precisely, the right time to sack him actually was? If we're special, and like to give managers time, rather than just have a knee-jerk reaction and sack them after a few bad results, then is this not too early?  And yet, following that to the letter would mean Moyes could have relegated us and we'd be like, well, we have to give him time, we're not like the other clubs...

The promise of giving someone a chance cannot become a security blanket for bad management.  

So should Moyes have been given more time.  Should he have built a team in the summer and been given another season?  Until recently I would have been in the camp that said yes, but it has become very apparent that nothing has improved over the season.  We look rubbish, we look like a team in the doldrums, out of ideas, out of energy, out of desire.  We look tired.  It's alright saying that it wasn't his team, and it's ageing etc. but really, Moyes has shown no hint that he had any answers. We signed Mata and that did nothing to improve us, so even if he signed more in the summer there's no reason to suppose he would know how to improve us next season.

4) Paradoxically, given his record in the Premier League, he did ok in the higher echelons of the Champions League.  For all the shouts that as Everton manager being his highest experience he couldn't cope competing with the very best in the Premier League, he actually did pretty well in the Champions League, one dreadful performance against Olympiakos notwithstanding, only being, narrowly, knocked out by a very good Bayern team.  Indeed in some of those performances there seemed to be a desire and an edge about us that was missing in pretty much every league performance.  Why he couldn't replicate that level of performance in the league is his ultimate downfall.

All of which adds up to this being the right decision, but we can be a little disappointed that it has come to this: from beginning to end there have been failings all over, not just from Moyes - in the boardroom; from the players, the senior players especially; the PR department - yet these failings can't excuse Moyes his shortcomings.  He had a chance to grow into the role and he didn't take it.

Return of Greatness

I'm not coming out as pro- or anti-Moyes, simply because I'm not sure its helpful.  The very fact that everyone seems to feel the need to have an opinion on the matter creates a problem - instead of all pulling in the same direction we split off into factions; adding extra pressures; the tabloids lap it up as a way to criticise us; the speculation doesn't help anyone - perhaps it unsettles players, why should they play for this manager when he may not be in the job much longer.

Of course it's difficult to just ignore the question, because, of course, not saying a thing is pretty much the same as supporting Moyes, for the question, once out, can not easily be put back in its box - only a string of results will do that - something we can all agree would be a satisfactory outcome.

As an example of how the question colours everything, take this piece from The Guardian by Daniel Taylor. He writes of how one of the coaches has been given an offensive nickname as evidence that the players don't like the way things are being run:

the latest leaks out of the dressing room are not exactly glowing for Moyes and his staff, in particular the coach who now goes by a deeply unflattering nickname. Footballers can be brutal sometimes and, behind his back, that coach is apparently being referred to as "fuck off (name)" – on the basis that is so often the first response when they hear his instructions.

So far so damning.  He continues, however:

In football that kind of insult is actually quite common. A Strange Kind of Glory, Eamon's Dunphy's book about his time at Old Trafford, tells one story about a sheet of paper being passed around the team bus showing a caricature of Matt Busby, with his nose as a penis, his cheeks as two testicles, and the caption: "Bollocks Chops". Carlos Queiroz was hardly the most popular man when he was Ferguson's assistant and Eric Harrison, the coach who nurtured the Class of '92, is probably better off not knowing some of the names they used to call him.

So actually it's pretty normal - I mean Matt Busby did OK, Queiroz wasn't exactly unsuccessful, and the "class of '92" did ok, so there's no problem then?

Plainly, though, it is not ideal

Put through the prism of the question of Moyes's position though and any nickname takes on a sinister hue.

While it is obviously difficult, especially when results are so dreadful (and god knows what tonight will bring...), to try and remain apart from the question, it would seem desirable.  The papers can make capital out of it, we should try and refrain, hard as that may be.  Many of our performances obviously deserve criticism, but whether that criticism needs to be hash-tagged Moyesout is not so obvious.

When Moyes was (probably misguidedly) given the job and Sir Alex did his (probably misguided) "support the manager" speech, there was a great deal of smugness around - how we're better than all those other clubs who sack their managers for the smallest run of bad results - and yet at the first sign of trouble everyone's out with their pitchforks, "Sack the manager!" And there's no conflict, "yes we said we'd support the manager, but this is exceptional circumstances" And the point is that everything in football is exceptional, and all those other clubs who sack their manager at the drop of a hat would argue that the situation they were in was also exceptional.

I'm not altogether sure what my point is, because obviously we are doing dreadful and someone has to carry the can, and everyone has the right to criticise, I don't want to be one of those people who claim anyone who calls for the manager to go is not a proper fan (Although I suspect these people might just be mythical Twitter creations).  Perhaps my point is simply that the way we handle adversity gives us the chance to show our class, our greatness, in adversity, as we have shown it for so many years previously in victory.

Or something.

Ballad of the Unsent Letter

To the writers of open letters, 

I hope all is well and you are not feeling too self-important today.  I make no apology for the open letter format because that would be a bit of a kop-out wouldn't it?  As if acknowledging the stupidity of a format before launching into it exonerates you.  It's having your cake and eating it.  And, hohoho, David Moyes wrote one too so that makes it ok, the use of the format is actually ironic.  Hehehe.  Let's forget that David Moyes is one man who has to speak to millions of fans, making the open letter the most sensible means to do so.  Unless your self-importance knows so few bounds that you imagined you deserved a hand-written missive falling through your letterbox.

But anyway, I suppose I just wanted to say thanks for airing us fans' concerns.  Thank god for you because how else would anyone know our views.  I mean, if their was some means for our voices to be heard individually, some Twitter thing or Facebook thing, then your letter would have been unnecessary, but as these modern means of communication are, it would seem, yet to be invented, thank god for the noble writers of open letters putting our views for us, airing dirty laundry in public, and in the very pages of the tabloids who take such delight in our troubles.

Thanks again, and in the future, when something happens at the club, I hope you will be there to put the tape over my mouth and presume to speak for me and the millions of other fans like me who are perfectly capable of expressing our own opinions, be they pro- or anti-Moyes.  Times have changed, and yes, you're right, the open letter is a crappy format, especially when it's paid for by a tabloid.

Yours sincerely,

Man Utd MediaWatch

Goal

A goal so good it brings the blog back to life, RvP with a brilliant volley from Rooney's brilliant pass -