High On Insanity

Today there's a pleasant surprise, with an article in The Telegraph by Kevin Garside which actually talks sense. Yes, really. He looks back at 1996 when we lost successive away games, and then:

United lost their next two matches at home to Fenerbahce in the Champions League and Chelsea in the Premiership, and closed out November with a 2-0 defeat at Leicester City. The year was 1996. Ten years after arriving at Old Trafford, three years after ending the 26-year championship famine Sir Alex Ferguson had run his course; his team were spent.

For those in Liverpool and beyond whose long-term memory extends no further than the last 10 days oblivion proved illusory. United won the title the following May. The apocalyptic vision presently playing out on Merseyside is understandable, but like the testimony of children, unreliable for its dependence on fantasy rather than Rafa Benitez's facts. ...

successive defeats are seen not as an irregular episode but a definitive and irreversible momentum swing. ...

Liverpool can win their remaining nine fixtures and still fall short, not that many in Rafa's wonderland are giving that notion much thought.

Common sense at last.
Sadly, it doesn't extend to any of the other papers, who are still in the fantasy world. Let's have a look at what Ian Wright, in The Sun, thinks of the Premiership title race:

MANCHESTER UNITED are one point ahead of Liverpool with a game in hand. But the title is Liverpool’s to lose due to the incredible momentum they have built.

???? No it isn't. Even with the momentum ("incredible" as it is that they've won 3 games in a row) it's not their's to lose. Juxtaposing this sentence with the fact that we're one point ahead with a game in hand - it is in every sense our's to lose - well, I'm wondering whether The Sun's Charlie Wyett (who Ian Wright was "speaking to") did this just to make Ian Wright look stupid. It works anyway. I won't go into his analysis of the rest of the season which amounts to nothing more than, "I have a feeling that Liverpool will win all their games, and I have a feeling that Man Utd will draw three games - a gut feeling you might say", whatever...
Graham Poll returns with a nice little piece on Ronaldo and Phil Dowd, full of the usual insightful comment:

When Cristiano Ronaldo is in top form he can be an absolute pleasure to referee, dazzling with his ability on the ball and possessing real charm off it.

It’s another joy to stand just a few metres away when he hits a free-kick in that unique style, straight into the top corner.

However, that Ronaldo has been missing for much of this season and, as a result, a lot of referees would not be disappointed to see the back of the petulant, sulking individual who was fortunate to receive only a yellow card at Craven Cottage on Saturday.

Which sounds to me like an admission that referees treat Ronaldo worse than other players (which is especially interesting given that Poll's basic argument is that Ronaldo shouldn't be treated differently to anyone else). He goes on:

His frustrations were clear when they culminated in a crude, lunging challenge on Danny Murphy which saw him cautioned.
Not content with that escape, he continued to react to opponents and match officials in an unacceptable manner, especially when he refused initially to advance towards Phil Dowd.

No ghost writer is credited in The Mail, so whether or not it is actually Graham Poll writing this, I don't know, but, regardless, I'm going to pick him up here. Take a look at the definition of the word "culminate":

to reach the highest point, summit, or highest development;
to end or arrive at a final stage.

So, he suggests that Ronaldo's behaviour reached it's highest point or even ended with the lunge at Murphy, but then goes on that his behaviour continued. Can't have it both ways. This isn't just pettiness on my part, because he then goes on to put an incident that happened before the lunge after the lunge: he refused to advance towards Dowd in the first half (I thought it was quite a funny incident). The use of the word "culminate" thus becomes even more inexplicable - he's making up things after the lunge to make it worse - in Poll's narrative this should have been the culmination. So while it may appear petty to pick up on these points, it is important to point them out because this should be considered the base level of bias - the choice of words. There's another example of this later on in another connection. Poll finishes with:

Players can’t win them all. Blaming referees for ‘forcing out’ Ronaldo is disingenuous. I don’t recall Gianfranco Zola or Thierry Henry speaking such nonsense.

When a player is renowned for going to ground too easily and too often it is difficult to get each and every foul correct.

When that player then reacts with moral indignation and incredulity at the referee’s
detection rate, is it any wonder that the referee can lose patience?

Of course, the referees love refereeing the best players in the world and want as many as possible in the Premier League - including Ronaldo - but there can be no special cases.

First off - Henry never complained? Is he serious? Second, Dowd wasn't just ignoring fouls on Ronaldo, he was ignoring fouls all over the pitch - the foul that caused Berbatov's injury went unpunished for instance. I put this down to his wanting to keep the game flowing, but it was certainly a misplaced idea, he should have taken a leaf out of the referee for the first leg against Inter's book, and kept giving the fouls and then booked players for persistent fouling. Keep the game flowing by stopping players fouling rather than ignoring the fouls.
James Lawton in The Independent continues the Ronaldo knocking with a nasty little article. I won't bother going through it, just piece together all the usual criticisms of Ronaldo and add a pinch of moral indignation and you'll get the picture.
The Mail report on "fears" that Ronaldo may quit England for "Spain, where referees are less tolerant of challenges", and includes comments from Paddy Crerand:

'We have a situation in England at the moment where we have the worst referees God ever created,' said 70-year-old Crerand, who is employed by United's official television channel MUTV as a presenter.

'The Scholes sending- off decision, you couldn't argue with that.

'But the Rooney dismissal was a farce. United are losing, he wants to get on with the game, he picks the ball up and hurls it about 40 yards straight to team-mate Jonny Evans.

'I know the referee's in that vicinity but it landed straight at Evans's feet. And the referee sent him off.

'I think referees want to do something to be noticed and get their photo in the papers. The sending-off of Rooney got him noticed. They talk about respect in the game but referees have got to earn it.'

Rooney and Scholes are both suspended for one game. As I noted above, the importance of choice of words is also evident here with most of the reports headlining the story with "Rooney escapes further punishment". "Escapes", which makes it sound like he was guilty and is lucky not to have been punished further, rather than there being no exceptional circumstances to warrant further punishment and him serving the standard ban. The Times take this a stage further by saying that Rooney and Sir Alex escape punishment. They also have to refer to Benitez's whining about Man Utd referee's, not noticing that we ended the game with 9 men, probably meaning that Rafa was talking nonsense about the "preferential" treatment we get...
We have the reason that our game against Villa won't be moved forward to give us time to prepare for the Porto game. The Guardian report that:

Sky had offered to bring forward the Villa game to 12.45pm the previous day so United would not have to play two crucial games in the space of barely 50 hours, exactly the kind of gruelling schedule that Ferguson would usually be desperate to avoid.

However, Sir Alex has decided that the extra day to recover from international trips is more important so the game remains on Sunday. The Daily Star gives an example of why this is necessary:

Tevez will play for Argentina in La Paz, 11,800ft above sea level, a week tomorrow. If Tevez returns to Manchester on the Friday suffering from altitude sickness, as well as travel weariness, United could have a serious striker shortage for a match they simply must win to reignite their title ambitions.