Do - nuts

I'm back. So much that I've missed. I've decided that it's going to be impossible for me to catch up with everything so I'm starting with a clean slate and yesterday's game.

The thing I find with the match reports today are their descriptions of the West Ham performance. I'm not going to claim that West Ham were great or anything, their defending certainly left a lot to be desired, but it's not as if it's that unusual for teams to come to Old Trafford and be overwhelmed. The point being that by slagging off West Ham they get to belittle us.

Look at this from The News of The World:

Let's get one thing straight. Manchester United would have beaten this woeful West Ham team under ANY circumstances.
...their [West Ham's] second-half performance stank. Really stank.

For goodness sake, Tevez — his smile more goofy than ever — was waving to the crowd while play went on around him.

With a one-man advantage and United far from fluent, West Ham barely ventured towards Edwin van der Sar's general vicinity.

And then there was a bizarre unwillingness to close opponents down.

Fergie said he did not dare risk Wayne Rooney with his hip problem.

He could have risked Mickey Rooney against this lot.

Being 3-1 down at Old Trafford, near the end of the season with nothing to play for and with our control of the ball in midfield, well, it's hardly conducive to a comeback.
And then the report even suggests they should have been talking about us:

But sadly, this game will be talked about as much for the pitiful opposition as for the majestic defenders of the Premier League crown.

Yeah, and you had no choice but to follow that trend...

The Guardian's report is at least a little more realistic, recognising as it does that West Ham haven't exactly been setting the Premiership alight since Christmas:

It took Manchester United three minutes to open the scoring in their final home Premier League game, and they might easily have reached double figures against a predictably limp West Ham had not Nani idiotically evened up the contest by getting himself dismissed before half time.

Even then, the home side's 10 men managed to increase their lead in the second half, with West Ham showing a marked lack of appetite for getting back into the game. This is not to suggest Alan Curbishley's players were doing their manager's second-favourite team a favour, West Ham have shown a marked lack of appetite since around Christmas, even without being two or three goals behind. Even so, Curbishley must have been embarrassed all over again by his players' abject failure to offer any semblance of a contest in the second half. He sent assistant Mervyn Day up for the press conference.

I do like this sentence though:

Ferguson raised a few guffaws by praising West Ham for their honesty here, and suggested Newcastle should show the same commitment against Chelsea, which is either the fib of the season or an attempt to get Kevin Keegan going for old time's sake.

Some realism in The Independent:

Chelsea conspiracy theorists may believe what they will. There was never any chance yesterday of West Ham United, with nothing to play for and a dozen players injured, pulling off one of their habitual upsets against a Manchester United side two wins from the title.
...
For all the visitors' weaknesses on the day, there is enough essential integrity in English football for it not to matter that United's final two matches were against two of Ferguson's greatest admirers in Curbishley and Wigan's Steve Bruce.

The Times report has nothing out of the ordinary.

The Telegraph report starts off well enough, "It was a traditional final day at Old Trafford. A thumping Manchester United win, another Premier League title almost in the bag and a lap of honour by the players", before continuing in the usual "feeble" West Ham vein, and finishing with the most insulting comparison possible:

Nani not only risked putting his side's title at risk, he ruined the game as a spectacle since United started playing more back passes than the old Liverpool sides of the Seventies and Eighties

Round up of quotes in The Daily Star:

“The way Chelsea are talking, they think it will be easy up at Newcastle – but we know it won’t be. We know Newcastle will do their job. They’ll make it hard for Chelsea.”

A different topic from The Guardian's Paul Wilson, who praises Sir Alex for his Champions League decisions:

Credit for that goes to Ferguson and his assistant Carlos Queiroz, who were not sufficiently dismayed by the first-leg performance to be panicked into making changes for the second. They could probably hear the fans grumbling, could have anticipated the 'Fergie loses plot' headlines that would have followed another inauspicious exit, but they kept faith in their players and their system and proved United can contain teams when necessary. They don't have to be the world's greatest entertainers every week and when you are playing another team of entertainers it is only sensible not to allow them to play to their strengths. If credit for 1968 went to Matt Busby, and 1999's Treble was mined from a rare seam of youthful talent, this year could belong entirely to the manager.

And it occurs to me that for the sake of the usual format of my posts I should have stuck that one about Liverpool of the seventies at the end, but I'm not changing it now. Just imagine that it's there - or here.