Bottled Violence

Just read this paragraph from today's Guardian report on our match:

Stoke performed with the kind of raw, rough commitment that someone who
had last attended a match in 1958 would have recognised, and with a few
inventive moves at free-kicks they would have found utterly baffling.
John O'Shea looked bewildered when dealing with Rory Delap's long
throws. Edwin van der Sar's concentration was not helped by the odd
beer bottle that appeared to be flung in his direction from the Stoke
fans while Jonny Evans, standing in for Rio Ferdinand, endured an
untypically poor afternoon.

Now tell me how this reference to throwing bottles at a goalkeeper can be made so casually?  Although to be fair it is the only report to bother mentioning it.  It's only Man Utd...
All the reports go on in the usual manner about Ronaldo and Rooney.  Not sure what Ronaldo did wrong at all, it certainly wasn't bookable, Rooney, maybe could have been booked, but there were far too many examples of rubbish refereeing in the game to insinuate, as Graham Poll does, that the referee favoured the "big team".  He just had a bad game, he could have sent off Fuller for dissent on numerous occassions and should have booked a lot more Stoke players for dissent than he did, and he could have given a second yellow to a player whose name escapes me off for elbowing Vidic second half in a carbon copy of an incident in the first half that did warrant a booking.
The greatest thing in the reports today is that they all go on about how great Stoke were, tenacious defending, only the sending off robbed them, brilliant, etc., and yet at least two of them give the Man of the Match to Vidic?!  They defended so well one of our defenders gets man of the match...

Procreating the Infection

Not really sure what to make of the game yesterday, it had the feeling of a friendly, even though it wasn't, and even though the game ended 5-3 it never really seemed to get going.
This, from The Guardian's report, sums it up quite well:

United's victory had more of the air of lively and spirited testimonial
than a do-or-die semi-final with six goals in the final 16 minutes
producing the spectacle Fifa and a crowd of 67,618 craved. The
spectators got the individual cameos they demanded too, with Nemanja
Vidic and Cristiano Ronaldo heading United into a comfortable interval
lead before Wayne Rooney emerged from the bench to score twice and collect the European champions' only booking of the game.

The Mail tries to make something out of Rooney's booking but even it can hardly muster much indignation:

Rooney was in delightfully belligerent form as a late substitute to
score two goals in a quite remarkable closing 18 minutes and was then
booked for what appeared an unnecessary hack at Gamba Osaka midfielder
Michihiro Yasuda.

'Well I got the ball, didn’t I?’ asked Rooney later, with one of
those don’t-mess-with-me looks that he usually reserves for match
officials and people who support Liverpool.

Indeed, he did. But
the fact that it was stuck tight to the prone Yasuda’s chest as Rooney
had a couple of digs at it earned him his yellow card.

And then the standard cliché about he must learn to control ... yawns ...
There's also reports on Ferguson's comments about Real's renewed rumour-mongering about Ronaldo.  From The Guardian:

"You don't think we'd get into a contract with that mob, do you?
Jesus Christ. I wouldn't sell them a virus. So that's a no — there is
no agreement between the clubs."

Ferguson added that it was not a
coincidence that Real should revive the Ronaldo story at a time when
they have just sacked Bernd Schuster as coach and lost to their La Liga
rivals Barcelona.

Rather bizarrely The Telegraph's headline is "Sir Alex Ferguson stokes up row with Real Madrid over Christiano Ronaldo", as if it is somehow Sir Alex's fault that this has made the news. Very snappy headline as well...

Liars A to E

Just a quick post on the releasing by the FA of the Commission's verdict on the Evra/Chelsea incident. Story here in The Times, full report here.
First off I'd like to point to this from The Times's report:

The FA has posted the commission’s full findings on its website in the interests of greater transparency in the disciplinary process, but this break from convention...

What better example of bias could there be? The "break from convention" could only be for the reason that they found against us and that they call into question Evra's character, i.e. it's a great excuse to badmouth us.
I shall just put in one quote from the commission's report to demonstrate how much they hated on us:

The DVD evidence does not itself show whether or not Mr Evra actually struck MrBethell. It is just not clear enough. Mr Evra denies it but we accept Mr Bethell’s evidence that he was struck on or near his right ear and it was clearly Mr Evra who struck him.

"We have no evidence but hey, that Evra, he looks like a right liar." That seems to be the attitude of the commission. Brilliant reasoning. The whole Evra started everything no matter what anyone says attitude that runs throughout the report also suggests that they just hated on us from day one.
Great "independent" report.

Escape Pod

I post this story with no comment:

Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo last night escaped disciplinary action from Uefa, Europe's governing body, and the Football Association for alleged violent conduct.

Actually, I have one comment: Why is the word "escaped"? Implying they were guilty despite the decision.

The news this morning is the same as yesterday s'far as I can make out: UEFA might investigate Rooney's alleged stamp. I've now seen the incident.



Wayne Rooney Antics Via Aalborg 10-dec-2008 - video powered by Metacafe
And I'm not altogether sure what the fuss is about, if anything the second incident seemed a bit worse. Yeah, his foot goes down on the guy's chest, but with no real force or intent, and the fact that it doesn't really hurt the guy can be seen by the fact that he goes down clutching his face, as if Rooney had stamped him in the face. That's cheating in my book... imagine if Ronaldo had done that...

If you want some

Didn't see the game last night, have seen the goals (a couple of great passes for a couple of great strikes), but not longer highlights so I'm not sure how much I can jump to the defence of Rooney.  However, from here it seems like the media are always after Ronaldo or Rooney and, as Ronaldo has had a bit of stick recently and wasn't playing last night, it's now obviously Rooney's turn.  I really love the way all the papers start talking about a UEFA investigation.  Any other team/player(with the exception of Ronaldo I guess...) and the whole incident would rate barely a mention.  Two sentences I'm going to quote from reports today, this from The Guardian:

It is never an encouraging sight for United when Rooney has worked
himself into a temper and for the rest of the match he seemed to be
picking fights with his opponents. Nobody could accuse him, however, of
distracting himself from the match. He was United's best player and,
six minutes into the second half, lifted the sense of shock that was
enveloping the stadium. Anderson's through-ball was beautifully
weighted, bisecting the Aalborg defence with one elegant swish of his
left boot. Rooney had the time to compose himself before finishing the
move with a precise shot from just inside the penalty area.

Acknowledgement of Rooney's temperment without making a mountain out of it before moving onto the football.  That's how it should be done.
And one sentence from the Mail's report:

But the United and England forward did seem to push his boot into Risgard's chest, albeit with questionable force

I would now really like to see the incident...

Rainy Dayz

This isn't strictly speaking a post that belongs here, but it is slightly fitting. It is about Roy Keane.
Paul Ince recently suggested that people were out to get him and Keane because they used to play for Manchester United, “They look at Keane and I in our Manchester United days and see us as snarling old people, but we are not like that". Which seemed an odd thing to say, coming from ex-Liverpool Ince. In the case of Keane though there may well be an element of truth to it. Looking through the many words printed since he left Sunderland there seems very much to be a sense of "told you so", journalists who have been waiting for a long time for Keane to fail finally having their moment. Of course we have the usual lip serivce to what a great player he was, like this, from Hugh McIlvanney, "Roy Keane is a figure of undoubted greatness in British football and the devoutest admirers of his achievements (among whom I would always wish to be numbered)", before the criticisms, but between the lines is pleasure in his "failure".
Of course it being considered a failure at all is a sign that the writers are against him in the first place. This article from The Sunday Times, which was a lot longer in the physical paper and some of the stuff I'll quote from it isn't in this internet version, contains the interesting fact that Roy Keane, despite being advised to sign his lucrative new contract while it was still on offer, refused to sign because he didn't think he'd done enough to merit it. He could have signed the contract and waited around to be sacked and looked forward to a pay off, but he didn't. The article also makes the point about how Keane didn't get on with the "modern footballer":

he railed against the sense of entitlement of the modern professional. Some of his players wore gloves, bobble hats and even scarves at training, another would walk onto the training ground with ear-phones in place and Keane wondered what football was coming to.

The bigger version of the article makes more of a point of players being concerned more with money than with winning and it is this that was presumably most hurtful to Keane. Simon Barnes suggests that, "The errors Keane made as Sunderland manager can be reduced to an inability to appreciate the biodiversity of footballing types". It seems to be less a case of this than that he refused to accept that anyone else could accept second best.

He left Sunderland before the crisis got too bad. He left before signing a new contract. This shouldn't be seen as a failure but as a refusal to accept second best. When I was thinking about this I remembered the image of Steve Mclaren under his umbrella, isolated on the touchline against Croatia, and I thought is that Roy Keane? Isolated and alone? And maybe it was but from the opposite perspective. Isolated because he refused failure, unlike Mclaren, isolated in his embracing of failure, of a willingness to accept an England that wasn't going to a major final.

Diva Operation Sex Nox

I'm beginning to think that The Independent has some sort of vendetta against us (something more than the usual bias that is)... This from James Lawton's match report:

Sunderland's defensive organisation was a tribute to the man attempting to rescue something from the wreckage of Keane's defection, assistant manager Ricky Sbragia, but as an example of a performance pitched at anything more than the most desperate survival it was pitiful.

So, too, was the way Cristiano Ronaldo represented himself as the newly crowned European Footballer of the Year.

This was whelping self-indulgence that outstripped even the exacting standards he has set for himself.

At least we've escaped from the myth of the plucky defeat, even if it's only to slag off Ronaldo (for a change, cutting edge football writing here...). He even goes back to the myth of him being on the pitch for 15 minutes, maybe he read The Times yesterday, rather than read his own paper - or actually pay attention during the game I guess...

The body language of his eventual departure, after 15 minutes of discomfort following a blow in the ribs from Andy Reid, could only be described as unprecedented as a statement of disregard for the immediate needs of his team.

He goes on in this vain for so long that it certainly feels something like 15 minutes of my life wasted - so really, don't bother with it.,
Flounce is a very popular word at The Independent, Sam Wallace uses it as well and again I wouldn't bother reading it, I think James Lawton and Sam must have wrote their pieces together over breakfast and a copy of The Sunday Times.
The Mail surprisingly don't have a bad report, looking at the fixture problems the World Club Championship is giving us:

With United flying to Japan for FIFA's self-indulgent World Club
Championship on Sunday, manager Ferguson knows he could celebrate
Christmas with his players anointed as the best on the planet.
But, more importantly, if United do not win at Tottenham, United could
also return from the Far East with an enormous job on their hands when
it comes to the far more important task of retaining their Premier
League title.

Daniel Taylor's match report in The Guardian is the best by far though, starting with a nice Roy Keane anecdote:

Everyone has a favourite Roy Keane story and they don't come much better than the time Phil Taylor came across him on a tour of Manchester United's
training ground. This was 2003, the one year out of 11 when the PDC
world championship trophy was not on Taylor's mantelpiece and he was
introduced to the players as world darts champion. Keane was injured,
in one of his coalmine-black moods, pounding away on an exercise bike.
He lifted his eyes for only a second. "Ex-champion," he replied, then
started pedalling again.

Nicely fitting this story into the context of the match:

So what would Keane, as a man whose managerial status now also
includes the prefix "ex-", have made of a match in which his old side
managed zero efforts at goal compared with 23 for the opposition? The
answer will probably never be known as Keane embarks on one of his
Trappist-like periods of silence, but it is fair to say he would not
have fallen into the trap of thinking Sunderland
played with distinction. Competitive courage, yes. But distinction? Not
in a game in which, attacking-wise, they contributed absolutely nothing.

In
football, the injury-time winner is about as brutal as it gets. It
leaves nothing but a sense of helplessness and, having already lost
their manager, it would take a stone-cold heart not to understand
Sunderland's suffering. But it is a strange set of circumstances when a
team can be so utterly dominated yet somehow feel so pleased with
themselves.

Finally someone just comes out and says it, Sunderland really deserved nothing. I take a bit of an issue with this bit though:

Perhaps the real issue is the imbalance of talent in England's top
division. Sunderland, after all, were just doing what they thought was
right to keep the game scoreless. It was an exercise in damage
limitation. Or to put it another way, they were trying to avoid a good
old-fashioned hiding.

This season is the closest the Premiership has been for seasons, both at the top and bottom, even West Brom showed more ambition than Sunderland, they got well beat, yes, but they came out with distinction and if you look at some of the good away results some of the lower teams have been getting, having a go is definately the way forward - indeed it could be argued that this is why the league is close this season, teams aren't being satisfied with points or being beaten before a ball has been kicked.

And Ronaldo? What does this report say of Ronaldo:

Wayne Rooney's fifth booking of the season means he will miss the trip
to White Hart Lane, while Patrice Evra is banned for the next five
domestic matches and Cristiano Ronaldo injured his hip on Saturday. But
it could have been much worse for the champions. Instead, they were
left to wonder whether, come next May, they will think of what happened
in the 91st minute as one of the season's decisive moments.

Perspective? In a Man Utd match report? Amazing!

One final story from The Mail (could have been The Mail on Sunday, just noticed it this morning) - Ronaldo marriage wrecker - how much more evil can one man be...

Yesterday Mr Haynes branded Ronaldo a ‘slimy toe-rag’ ...

The cleaning firm boss said: ‘I am a husband who has been deceived and cheated. I am filing for divorce.’

However friends of Alyona say the couple had already split up and were living apart when she met Ronaldo.

Her
friend said: 'It's not a full-blown love affair yet but it certainly
seems to be moving in that direction and they plan to meet up again.

'She's furious with John for accusing Ronaldo of breaking up their marriage because it was already on the rocks when they met.'

Mr Haynes said: ‘When I found a telephone at home I saw it wasn’t one of my contract phones that she normally uses.

‘Then I saw it was bleeping and I picked it up and went through the messages.

‘There
were a total of 300 messages from each of them over a two-week period.
I saw 49 messages coming in from him with his number saved as Ronaldo.

‘The text messages looked like they had been written by a seven-year-old it was dreadful English and they mentioned Portugal.

Siege of the Twilight Loon

Certain papers make a huge deal out of Ronaldo being injured and going off the pitch during the game yesterday.  The usual agenda.  Read the headline of this from The Telegraph (which is fast replacing The Mail as stupidest paper: "Christiano Ronaldo's bizarre Old Trafford substitution leaves Alex Ferguson bemused".  How do The Telegraph know he was bemused?  Let us see:

Sir Alex Ferguson watched bemused from the directors' box - the Scot is
serving a two-match touchline ban - and was quickly on the phone as Ronaldo
headed off the pitch.

"He got real kick on the hip-joint, just like Wayne Rooney did last year
when he was in pain for a while and missed a couple of games," said
Ferguson.

"There was no need for him to come to the bench, though. The best thing
is to get treatment straightaway. It was the sensible thing to do.

"We will see what he is like, although I was going to make changes for
the Champions League game against Aalborg on Wednesday anyway."

I didn't see this "bemused" look, whether I blinked or whether The Telegraph are capable of reading more into Sir Alex's looks than me I'm not sure.  Either way his comments after the game, surely a better guide to his thoughts don't speak of bemusement.

The Times version of events seems entirely wrong as well:

Ronaldo, who appeared one dropped lollipop away from a tantrum from the moment
the game kicked off, took a blow to the ribs when attempting to convert a
chance created by Dimitar Berbatov early in the second half. A quarter of an
hour later, after much wincing and limping, Ronaldo just walked off the
field.

Starts with the usual cliches about him before, and I had had a bit to drink by this stage of the game but still, blatantly exageratting the amount of time between the injury and going off the pitch, presumably intending to give an image of Ronaldo "wincing and limping" for a ridiculous amount of time, rather than the minutes I'm fairly sure it was (The Independent claim 5 minutes between Ronaldo's injury and him going
off, and I think that's probably a rounded up estimate...).

To the actual game.  I think it is fair to say that it wasn't the greatest performance ever, first half we played some nice football, second half we maybe got lost a bit.  But 22 shots to 0 tells its own story as far as I'm concerned.  And, if you read between the lines of the reports, it even comes out in the papers despite their hatred of us.

The Observer report exemplifies this, first off praising Sunderland:

Moral victories will not keep Sunderland in the Premier League, though a few more performances of this quality should see them shooting up the table.

The
fact the game had entered the 91st minute when Nemanja Vidic secured
the points says it all, apart from adding that Old Trafford was
mightily relieved and that Sunderland still managed to come back and
scare Manchester United in stoppage time.

It
would appear Sunderland could teach their former manager a few lessons
in stickability and refusing to give up the ghost just because the odds
seem stacked against you. Judged on this gritty display there does not
seem a lot wrong with the Wearside fighting spirit.

Yes Sunderland defended well, but performances like this one won't see them "shooting up the table" for the simple reason that they couldn't muster up a single shot, and last time I checked it helped in scoring goals.
The Independent go for the having cake and eating it approach - they praise Sunderland, while at the same time berate them:

This is why you would not want to be a football manager. Not just Roy
Keane, anybody. After holding out for 90 minutes and four seconds,
after frustrating Manchester United at every turn with a performance of
massed defiance and no little spirit, Sunderland finally cracked last
night. They did not deserve to win and, given United had 23 chances and
71 per cent of possession, you could argue that Sunderland did not even
deserve a point; but that they held out for so long meant that when the
crack came it felt sharp and cruel.

Sunderland deserved what they got but it was still so cruel.  Great analysis.  Especially as the bizarre report also concludes, with regards to Sunderland, "at times the lack of forward progress was an embarrassment to the League".  So what was so cruel? And then they turn round again and say that Roy Keane would probably be feeling "some pride".  Pride at being an embarrassment to the league?   Odd.

99 Red Balloons

A good article on The Guardian blog about Ronaldo and the Ballon d'Or:

On the bench, on the pitch, talking at length about himself in the
press: at all times he talks, acts and plays as though he is the best
footballer in the world. By miles. This is understandably annoying. And
all the more so because it's true.

Black Balloon

From the BBC, that unbiased source, "Ronaldo named Europe's top player":

Cristiano Ronaldo has been crowned European Footballer of the Year by France Football magazine.

Ronaldo won the prestigious Ballon d'Or trophy after scoring 42
goals as Manchester United won the Champions League and Premier League
last season.

"It is one of the most beautiful days of my life, something I dreamed of as a child," said the 23-year-old winger.

I find it odd that the BBC decides to finish off this article telling us how Torres (who finished 3rd) was brilliant for Liverpool last season and yet there's no mention of Messi (who finished 2nd).

This report in The Independent has the full quotes from Ronaldo:

"Great emotion fills me but I cannot really describe it.

"I want to thank those who voted for me, those who know me and those who live
with me.

"I was not worried, because I was aware of what I did in the course of the
season.

"But to the people who mentioned my name, I say thank you. Thank you also to
my team-mates.

"This (trophy) is one that I want to win again because it is so good.
Therefore, I will wake and I will say to myself 'I want to be even better'."

To return to Sunday's sending off, Ronaldo explains what happened in this report in The Guardian.  Of course from the first paragraph we can see whose side they're on:

Christiano Ronaldo last night strongly criticised the referee Howard Webb for sending him
off in Sunday's Manchester derby and claimed the man considered by many
to be the Premier League's best referee had failed to listen to his explanation for the handball which led to the dismissal.

Is it really necessary to have that bit about the best referee?  Surely he should be judged on each incident not on reputation? But anyway:

"[Wayne] Rooney knocked in a corner, I jumped and that was when I
heard a shout from [Micah] Richards [City's defender] and
simultaneously the sound of a whistle.

"At that moment I was
convinced that the referee had whistled for a foul. I stopped trying to
head the ball and score a goal, and I grabbed the ball so Richards
could get help . . . after Richards yelled I thought that he was hurt
and needed assistance. I tried to explain what had happened but he
didn't want to listen. I hadn't done anything wrong. I heard the
whistle so I took the initiative to stop the match."

Sounds reasonable enough, doesn't it?

All of which must have come as a surprise to the Manchester City team
who, quite apart from hearing no whistle, had seen Ronaldo pick up a
first booking for hacking down their team-mate Shaun Wright-Phillips

So there wasn't a whistle?  So what?  Haven't we all established this fact?  Does the absence of the actual whistle mean that Ronaldo couldn't have thought he heard a whistle?  And what does the foul on Wright-Phillips have to do with anything?  Jesus.

Final word to Ronaldo:

"I have come to understand that every movement I make, on or off the
pitch, is analysed to death," Ronaldo added. "If I don't celebrate
goals it is because I am sad, if I talk to the public it is because I
have lost my humility. People are always waiting for me to do something
and they pick on absolutely normal and unimportant things to criticise.
They analyse things that have nothing unusual about them through a
magnifying glass."

Hands Around My Throat

A pretty good performance yesterday, no real worries throughout the entire game, just one chance for them in the dying moments, safe as houses.  Of course all the papers tell us just how stupid Ronaldo was, how it was the most obvious sending off ever, etc., etc..  This completely ignores the facts, obviously.
I'm not going to deny that it was a bit of a strange thing to do, handling the ball like that, but a yellow card?  The Telegraph report at least manages some humour from it, rather than the pofacedness of the other papers:

Cristiano Ronaldo is clearly so determined to get his hands on the Ballon
d'Or, the traditional prize awarded to the European Footballer of the Year,
that he is now actively grabbing any spherical object that comes his way,
regardless of the consequences.

Bizarrely it is The Mail which, between the lines, gives the truth about the situation - this report tells us that Howard Webb changed his mind:

After initially seeming content to only award a free-kick, Webb sent off the distraught Portugal winger

While Graham Poll, while nowhere following this thought to its logical conclusion, tells us when a referee should book someone for a deliberate handball:

handball is not a mandatory caution.

The player must be seen
to be either breaking up a promising forward attack or trying to gain
an advantage with his deliberate act.

So Ronaldo shouldn't have been booked.  Simple as that.

So tell me how The Mail's actual match report says this:

Booked correctly for a late tackle on Shaun Wright-Phillips and
rightly again for a peculiar handball at a corner, the 23-year-old
fully deserved the red card issued by referee Howard Webb.

On the whole, the official enjoyed an almost faultless afternoon.

Even the first booking was a far too harsh, ijn fact I thought Howard Webb had, maybe not quite a shocker, but he certainly was over fussy and eager to book players.

The most outrageous report of the day is in The Independent though, read this:

But his dismissal, for an unfathomable two-handed volleyball punt in
the six-yard box, is the latest in a series of theatrics which are
raising serious questions about his mind for the title-retaining job in
hand – and about his manager's latest claims about his greatness. There
has always been something incendiary about Ronaldo – witness his
straight red in the January 2006 derby match for a lunge at Andy Cole –
but never such a continuous state of distraction.

So incendiary is he that we have to go back to 2006 for an example - the other sending off was nothing as well, and how "incendiary" it is to handle a football I really don't know.  Where's the sense of perspective here?

Then read this:

Before all that, a moment's consideration for a real football story,
because it screams out hypocrisy. Shaun Wright-Phillips, the best man
on the field in the 151st Manchester derby, was hacked in a way which
did for his free-flowing threat and saw no fewer than four United
players – Darren Fletcher, Patrice Evra, Michael Carrick and Ronaldo –
booked for fouls on him. The Blackburn manager, Mark Hughes, was
diplomatic. "Shaun was the attacking threat for us and I would suggest
that United felt [that] and fouled him in possession," he said.
Ferguson, who gave us that baton imagery, would have been fulminating
had Ronaldo received the same.

What?  Strong refereeing to stop it was what Sir Alex was asking for and he congratulated the referee after the Villerreal game for the use of the card and the way he handled the fouling on Ronaldo.  Our players were booked (though as far as I'm concerned the word "hack" is overstrong here) so where's the hypocrisy?  Oh.  It's in The Independent.

And now this:

the winger's malevolent side was on show. Ronaldo should have been
dismissed before the hour when, having hacked at Wright-Phillips and
been booked by Howard Webb, he looked the referee in the eye and
offered ironic applause. Ronaldo was spared, only to leave after
raising his hands after climbing towards a corner Rooney lofted over
nine minutes later.

First he's "incendiary", now he's "malevolent".  The booking was very harsh and while his handclapping was perhaps ill-advised, to suggest he should, rather than could, have been sent off seems ridiculous.
I would check through my archive but I don't have time, but from memory Ian Herbert has a history of this hatred of us, maybe he should go and watch a team he could bring himself to enjoy watching...