The Hater's Wish

It occurred to me today, reading the reports, that one of the few times we get any praise is when we lose. When we win, it's always that we were lucky or the other team didn't turn up or the referee handed us the game, but when we lose, well, take this from The News of the World:

the real significance is that United did not respond to the Liverpool humiliation with any of the qualities we associate with them. Tireless endeavour, sublime talent, relentless tempo — and class.

It's a rather simple tactic, to further condemn our performance, compare it to how we normally play. It's a fundamentally dishonest tactic because when we do play well we get little credit, and the same criticisms of Rooney and Ronaldo surface no matter if we win or lose.
First half, no bones about it, we were rubbish. No excuses. Second half we played well and the chances we created we could have won the game. Credit to Fulham though, they stuck to their task well. So I'm not going to sit here and bring up stats and criticise reports for saying we weren't any good. There is enough to criticise anyway...
Take the Rooney sending off, all the reports, pretty much without exception say that he "threw the ball away" - The Telegraph, for example:

he chucked the ball away in disgust, leaving Dowd no option but to send him off

He literally threw the ball towards, not away. Why does every paper claim this then? It was, I assume, the manner, rather the direction, of the throw that got him sent off. And this "no option", - of course their was an option, as quite a few papers also point out, he could have sent off Ronaldo for dissent, but instead chose to give him a final warning (the difference being that all the reports wanted Ronaldo sent off so, for them, Dowd was in the wrong on that one).
Onto Ronaldo and, similar to the MOTD highlights I complained about earlier, most reports ignore the context of his "petulance". For instance The Sunday Times:

Cristiano Ronaldo could easily have earned the same penalty as Rooney and Scholes, who will miss United’s next fixture, versus Aston Villa, for a foot-off-the-ground lunge on Murphy for which he was yellow carded but might have seen red, and a prissy show of dissent minutes later, for which the referee merely warned him.

The Telegraph, at least in this respect, is the exception, with even some praise of Ronaldo coming through:

Ronaldo, though, was so frustrated after being the victim of one assault on his Achilles that he lunged in almost knee high at Murphy. If he had connected he would have been off; Dowd settled for the yellow.

Yet Ronaldo's wildness at least energised him and United. He forced one brilliant save from Schwarzer from a header before the Australian made an amazing double stop to keep out Park and Rooney.

The Telegraph conforms to the usual standard in their treatment of Berbatov however:

United were so under the cosh that the dismal Berbatov had to be sacrificed at half-time.

None of the papers seem to recognise that he went off injured. I'm not going to argue against the notion that he had a bad game, but it doesn't alter the fact that he went off injured at half time and wasn't "sacrificed". The Mail On Sunday the same:

Dimitar Berbatov was a listless, ineffectual lone target man, and at half-time, when no one in a United shirt escaped Ferguson's wrath, Rooney was instructed to replace the Bulgarian.

The most staggeringly wrong though is The News of the World:

Certainly not good old Dimi the grafter, who eventually made way at half-time, maybe staying in the dressing room with a chipped fingernail.

Twisted ankle I believe...
Newspapers, why so inaccurate?
Sir Alex didn't try and hide the fact that we were rubbish:

"If you lose games in March and April, it will cost you," admitted Ferguson. "We still have a slender lead but not a lot. The disappointment for me is that we didn't get a response after the Liverpool game."

The idea that a hair dryer must have been blowing on the banks of the Thames was given credence when Ferguson suggested "there was some talking done at half-time" after United had been outclassed before the break by a team they had hammered here 4-0 just a fortnight ago.

But Ferguson was unhappy with both the sendings-off by referee Phil Dowd.

Scholes handled on the line, allowing Danny Murphy to give Fulham the first-half lead from the spot, but Ferguson felt the official could have spared his veteran. "But that's Phil Dowd for you," he complained.

"The ball was thrown to where the free-kick was being taken. Did it hit the referee? No," said Ferguson. "But there's no point talking about the referee. We didn't play well enough in the first half and that's why we lost."

One last thing, Will Buckley, on The Guardian blog, has a humorous piece on how to get round Sir Alex not talking to certain organizations.