Pretty Woman

When the Wayne Rooney scandal first broke - the original scandal, the sleeping with prostitutes scandal, I spent a little time trying to think of a defence, a defence beyond the "It doesn't affect his football, so it doesn't affect the way I view him," which seemed a bit of a cop-out. Anyway I eventually thought of the defence but one thing after another interrupted my resolution to write it and next thing you know he's demanding a transfer and acting like a proper prick.
What has made me return to the defence is, obviously, Rooney's return to the team to a "rapturous" reception. All the papers highlight the great reception he got. I wasn't at the game, so perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps over the TV it came across differently than in the ground. But to me it came across as half-hearted - a kind of begrudging "well, he is our player, we have to cheer and chant his name - don't we?" from a few sections of the ground -rather than a fully-fledged hero's welcome from all corners.
I based my defence of Rooney on the fact that he'd been sleeping with a prostitute, rather than having an affair. In this I argued, he was positing money as a way to avoid emotional attachment - he wasn't actually cheating on Coleen emotionally - it was a simple consumer transaction. In this I was following the lead of Jacques Lacan, who in his Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" argues than psychoanalysts avoid becoming involved in their patient's problems by virtue of the exchange of money:

Is it not the responsibility their transference entails that we neutralize by equating it with the signifier that most thoroughly annihilates every signification - namely, money?

Slavoj Zizek extends this to all exchanges:

In market exchange ... the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but merely to a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. ... From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enables us to have contacts with others without entering into proper relations with them.

And thus Rooney is better than John Terry et al. because he put the barrier of money between him and his "other woman."
I bring this back up because it also seems to explain his relationship with us - he doesn't have to care about the club because he's getting paid - there is no emotional attachment there - he is simply a prostitute.
Does this excuse his behaviour? In a way, it does, but only if we, as fans, on the other side of the equation, treat him in the same way - no emotional ties, he's a prostitute, plying his trade for us, giving us momentary pleasure, but afterwards, forgotten. My point being if Rooney wants to make a load of money off us, good luck to him, but we really shouldn't be applauding him for it, or chanting his name - he is after all just doing his job.
Perhaps, if he does his job well, he might end up as Julia Roberts to our Richard Gere (it's a long time since I've seen Pretty Woman so I can only hope this analogy works...), we'll fall in love with him again and persuade him to love us too and renounce prostitution, but until then - let's keep our relationship purely professional.

Weasel

In the same way that today's cuts to public spending by the Conservatives are presented as necessary for the good of the country, while all the time simply being the expression of the Conservative party's ideology, so is the assertion that Wayne Rooney wants away because of the "lack of ambition" of the team just as ridiculous. He's not worried about the team - he's worried about himself.
Look at this by Henry Winter - where he takes a statement by MUST and legitimises Rooney leaving with it. Obviously MUST have an agenda, and I don't want to get into the whole Glazer thing here, and obviously they take the opportunity to get their agenda in the news via the Rooney story. Good on them. But the statement shouldn't be used to argue that Rooney's leaving is tied to the Glazers. Take Henry Winter here:

To lose one star like Cristiano Ronaldo could be considered a misfortune. To lose another in Rooney looks more than carelessness; it looks like the dread hand of debt holding United and Ferguson back.

It's an absolute red herring to bring Ronaldo into it, Ronaldo leaving was about his desire to play for Real, it wasn't about having to sell, it wasn't bad-handling of him, it was good handling that we got another year out of him. And Ronaldo was a special player, Rooney is merely a good player - a good player who deserves even more than Berbatov the moniker of "inconsistent."

Similarly, Jim White gives Rooney his excuse, except he goes even further into dodgy connections:

From his position on the inside, Rooney saw what was happening: United, their financial priorities entirely focussed on paying off debt, were no longer able to compete at the top. Simple as that. Even to utter the phrase Ronaldo, Rooney and Tevez is to send a shiver of discomfort down the spine of any United fan. This should have been the core of their team for years to come, a trio to be mentioned in the same breath as Law, Best and Charlton. By January, all three will have gone. To lose one might be considered unlucky, two careless, but three is a woeful dereliction of duty.

I'm sorry? Why did Tevez leave? Not enough first team football (such was his excuse anyway). But apparently Jim White has him down as the core of our team for years. He could barely geta game. Ronaldo again was a special case. Nothing to do with debt, he wanted to live his dream.
The Rooney Jim White paints is not the Rooney of reality. Rooney's a good player, but he's no Ronaldo, he's got no right to be looking round his fellow players and judging them not good enough to play with him. This season Berba and Nani and Giggs and Scholes should be looking at Rooney and wondering whether he's good enough to play for Man United, not the other way round.
Here's a more realistic version, from David Conn in The Guardian:

The agent who orchestrated Rooney's move then, and is orchestrating it now, is Paul Stretford, the former vacuum cleaner salesman with the chequered career in football, and now heading for another almighty pay day. Rooney, the boyhood Everton fan and player who had pledged his life to the Blues, made himself a red on transfer deadline day, 31 August 2004. The £20m United paid and £50,000 per week salary Stretford negotiated for him made Stretford an initial £1m, rising to £1.5m if Rooney stayed at United for five years. Now, he has.

Stretford has always known this next contract of Rooney's, for the mature five years of a footballer's liftetime, from the age of 25 to 30, ought to dwarf that fee, and be the most lucrative of both their careers and, very likely, ever in English football.

The lengths Stretford went to sign Rooney in the first place emerged in a series of dragged-out hearings which culminated in him being described as an unreliable witness in Warrington crown court, banned by the Football Association from acting as an agent for nine months and fined £300,000 for breaches of the agents' code of conduct.

"The government's programme of cuts looks like a classic example of disaster capitalism: using a crisis to re-shape the economy in the interests of business." Or in Rooney's case: using the Glazer crisis to re-shape his career in the interests of his and his agents wallets..."

Good riddance to both of them.

Broadcasting Live

It's been a while since I was on this blog, but I've a few spare minutes and I thought this article deserved slightly more than the 140 characters I usually manage nowadays...
I say deserved when what I really mean is that I have too many complaints to fit in 140 characters... It's an article on the BBC versus ITV coverage of the World Cup and while I'm not exactly a huge fan of the BBC coverage, it is certainly better than ITV's. Here the writer praises Adrian Chiles:

Adrian Chiles has made a smooth transition to the ITV host slot and is, if truth be told, a much more interesting broadcaster than Gary Lineker. Personally I find the ITV panelists much more interesting than the same old faces on the BBC.

Which is rubbish, Chiles is certainly chummy enough but he doesn't have the necessary presence to carry off hosting duties, maybe he could have got away with doing some second show, not the main highlights, but some sort of MOTD2 style programme... And the "same old faces" at the BBC? This is true for both, the usual bunch are there on both channels, the new faces on both are given cursory time to prove some sort of internationalist credentials - during one game Andy Townsend and Gareth Southgate rambled on for so long I didn't even realise there was a third person there until a wide shot appeared just before the adverts...
And the author of this has no consistency either: after moaning about the "same old faces" he then wants "Motty" to do the final... I think, because the sentence he says this in is followed by one slagging him off:

Meanwhile, ITV might even have the edge with commentators in this tournament. Although Clive Tyldesley is not to everyone's taste he is a familiar voice and has plenty of experience. Meanwhile the BBC will be without John Motson for the first final in aeons. Motty should have been pensioned off years ago, what with his inability to work out what was actually happening on the pitch.

So the BBC is rubbish now Motty won't be doing the final but actually he was rubbish anyway - you might have thought someone who could see what was happening on the pitch might be preferable.
I imagine this piece is just playing devil's advocate, the lacklustre way it's written hardly convinces us the writer believes what he's saying, and if he does.... God help us...

The Acid Never Lies

Haven't been here in a while, and this is just a flying visit, but I've a couple of minutes to spare and I'm still a little annoyed by our Champions League exit and the reporting of it, so here I am.
Sir Alex had a go at journalists for their remorseless negativity about us, and for concentrating on his "typical Germans" remark, rather than on aspects of our performance, the journalists then get together to tell lies about how their coverage of us is great - I saw Daniel Taylor of The Guardian on Twitter saying that 95% of articles about us are favourable (this is the Daniel Taylor who tweeted incessently his criticisms of Sir Alex's remark for the following 24 hours or so absolutely confirming Sir Alex's thoughts on the press...), which is as blind as the linesman from the Chelsea game...
Today I saw a piece which is just such a lie that I had to mention it in the context of the supposedly great paper coverage we get. From The News of The World:

Manchester United's manager is noted for sounding out his senior stars, calling mini-conferences before he makes the big decisions.

Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Rio Ferdinand are often asked their opinion, brought into the manager's inner circle to talk team shape and tactics.

Not this time.

This one was down to manager and player, plotting his return to the team for the Champions League quarter-final tie after he came through a secret training session.

Slagging off Sir Alex - which might be stupid enough at the best of times, but to simply lie about something to do it?! See this from The Guardian:

he took a risk by starting a man whose injury – sustained in the closing seconds of the first leg in Munich – had been expected to rule him out for three weeks, Ferguson said the decision was not his alone. "He [Wayne] had burst a blood vessel in Germany," he said. "But, once the swelling had gone down on the Sunday, Steve McNally [the Manchester United doctor] said he could be ready for Wednesday.

"I said I doubted that very much, but Steve said that the swelling and the bruising had gone and the scan was perfect. The work Wayne did on Tuesday persuaded me to put him in a practise game with the other players. He was perfect – shooting and tackling all over the bloody place.

"Then you have to decide if it was worth the risk. I spoke to him on the Wednesday morning and he said he'd had no reaction. He wanted to play."

It was such a secret from the other players that... he played against them in a practise game...

And this is favourable coverage apparently...

Its Later Than You Think

Just read this from yesterday's Sun. It's not Man Utd related but it's too ridiculous to ignore: Ian Wright on Ashley Cole.

I know Ashley, and would like to see his marriage survive.

I am sure 'Brand Cheryl' will be advising her to ditch the bloke immediately. But I would like them to give it one last go with a marriage counsellor.

Some people will say he is a piece of s**t. Equally, there are two sides to every story.

There have been two totally unrelated women who have said how intimate he was with them.

Something was obviously missing from his relationship at home, so he has decided to go elsewhere.

Maybe Cheryl has been at fault as well, with her work in a band, on hit TV shows and flying all over the world.

It seems Ashley may have felt lonely and neglected and this might have been the reason why he has had to look further afield.

Perhaps, and I'm stereotyping, football isn't the best place to look for modern views on sexual politics, but is Ian Wright living in 1910 rather than 2010? "That Cheryl with her job, no wonder poor Ashley felt the need to cheat..." If I hadn't watched Live At Studio 5 I'd be hard pushed to believe this was a serious opinion.

Perhaps the key comes at the start of the bit I've quoted - Ian Wright knows Ashley Cole, and will say any shit to defend him.

RubBERBAnd

Here's the highlights from the game last night, didn't see the game, unavoidable distraction, but from the highlights it looks like we were well worth the 3-0, and the first two goals especially are well worth a watch, both feature Berba passing beautifully to Valencia to cross onto Rooney's head and into the back of the net:

And Sir Alex interviewed after the game, on Rio's absence, the Carling Cup Final, Rooney, Anderson's injury and Owen:

Critically Acclaimed

Another useless article to come in the aftermath of the Milan game, this from Kevin McCarra on The Guardian blog. It has it all: selective use of facts:

On the domestic scene they have five points fewer than at this juncture last season and that looks an appropriate measure of the shrinkage in quality.

But something like 18 extra goals than at this stage last season? Just as McCarra's measure isn't an appropriate measure of this season's loss of quality, so my stat serves as an inappropiate measure of our growth in quality....
Selective memory:

Antonio Valencia, for instance, has not taken Old Trafford by storm since his move from Wigan Athletic but the impact of a strong-running substitute with a good cross is apparent as a game becomes stretched when players tire. The Ecuadorian sent over the ball with which Rooney gave United a 2-1 lead on Tuesday.

Something like 10 games (?) ago he could have got away with this, but Valencia has now settled in the team and when he starts - not just impact substitutions - he's been excellent.
All round nonsense -

People would prefer to forget Luciano Moggi, the former director general of Juventus who is serving a five-year ban from the sport, but his opinions cannot always be rejected. Prior to the Champions League ties, he said, "We will see that calcio is not competitive on the international stage. We will be lucky if one side makes it through to the next round."

I fail to understand this quote's necessity. Why quote this guy who you say we wish to forget on a matter that pretty much everyone noted - belatedly - last year - Italian teams ain't what they used to be...
And strange gaps in the argument - he concentrates a lot of words on our defence before saying that Rooney is carrying us, while the only other midfield/attacking player he mentions is Valencia - who he praises, after a fashion - so where's the evidence that Rooney is carrying us? He should have used the easy route that Daniel Taylor uses in the same paper - when all else fails, slag off Nani:

Nani appears to have quickly reverted to type, having duped some observers recently into thinking he could be more beguiling than bewildering. Ferguson rates him as the best crosser of the ball at Old Trafford but his delivery is too erratic and it brings to mind Cristiano Ronaldo's early performances for the club, when players such as Gary Neville and Ruud van Nistelrooy would regularly be seen dragging their fingers down their face in frustration. The difference is that Nani, unlike Ronaldo, does not show any sustained improvement.

Yes, he didn't have his best game, but I remember at least one quality cross he put in which no one strove to get on the end of, and to suggest he has reverted to type after one bad game seems a trifle mean-spirited...

Daffy Duck

A further day to reflect on the AC Milan game and it seems some journalists have spent the extra time pointlessly attempting to squeeze our excellent victory into the established patterns of criticism. Here's some idiot in The Times (James Ducker - so tempting, the obvious rhyme...) who uses it to slag off Berba:

Amid all the tributes being paid to Wayne Rooney after another virtuoso performance on Tuesday evening against AC Milan took his goals tally for the season to 25, it was easy to forget that Dimitar Berbatov was even at San Siro.

Yes, it would have been pretty good if Ducker had...

Berbatov’s omission against Milan meant that he has started only eight of United’s 20 most high-profile matches since his arrival when, because of his age, 29, and the size of transfer fee, many suspected that he would be an almost permanent fixture in the first XI.

I love it when journalist come up with random criteria for "high profile games," almost as much as I love it when they put words into the mouths of "many," of course Sir Alex never considers rotation, everyone assumed Berba would play every bloody game... The ridiculous thing (first ridiculous thing...) about the article is that Ducker actually puts the bog standard non-slagging off reason in it:

United are geared to getting the best out of Rooney and that may be something Berbatov has to come to live with. The 4-3-3 formation Ferguson favours in the big games means operating with a lone spearhead in attack, and with the days of Rooney being pushed out wide long gone, that has invariably resulted in Berbatov dropping to the bench.

But look at this final flourish of ridiculousness:

One of Ferguson’s many reasons for not signing a striker in January was his fear that Berbatov, a player who needs to feel loved, would view the arrival of another forward as a sign that his days at United were numbered, but his repeated omissions are creating a dilemma of their own.

What? That's a new one on me, has Ducker been smoking something? Or dreamt a conversation with Sir Alex. And treating it like something that should be treated logically, rather than the laughable rubbish it is, if it is "one of many reasons," at which point is it worth mentioning.... yes, none... quite...

European Oils

A few thoughts on our glorious victory last night and the paper's reaction to it.
1) On playing Rafael - most of the papers make a big deal about this, his inexperience being cited as reason why he shouldn't have been up against Ronaldinho. Firstly Sir Alex puts it pretty well:

Ferguson admitted that Rafael had "made mistakes" in the game but vigorously defended his decision to play the teenager. "We have invested a great deal in him and we are not going to stop [trusting him] just because it is Milan," he said. "He has to learn that against Ronaldinho this is the real world and he has to develop his game. He made some mistakes but he won't make them again next season."

Secondly, did anyone in our defence (or anyone's defensive play) come up to scratch:

Did the inexperience of Rafael and Evans play into Milan’s hands? It is hard to say so, because Rio Ferdinand, still feeling his way back to fitness, and Patrice Evra looked equally vulnerable. Evra made an erratic start, losing possession to Pato in the first minute, mistiming a challenge on the same player and, from the resulting free kick swung in by Beckham, sending an ill-advised overhead kick to Ronaldinho, whose volley took a deflection off Carrick and ended up in the net.

But also I personally felt that Rafael grew into the game, Ronaldinho's influence waned, partly I'd argue as a result of Rafael's work, although Ronaldinho is criticised in certain quarters for tiring second half - I think it's as much that we (and Rafael in particular) gave him less space/time on the ball, and we held the ball better ourselves after the opening 20 minutes or so.

2) Some of the papers argue we were outclassed in the first half especially, and Milan looked good, first half especially, at times, but we made them look good with sloppy passing and defending and allowing them space in the first half - towards the end of the half we started keeping the ball better and our forward play improved, resulting in the goal, yet our defence still looked lacking in concentration. 2nd half we looked the better team all over, bar the final ten or so minutes as we began to make life difficult for ourselves by panicking at Milan's second, a problem we saw in a couple of games earlier in the season - an uncharacteristic lack of composure in defending narrow leads as time runs out (the Arsenal game at Old Trafford springs to mind). Which brings us to the third point:

3) This headline - "Great entertainment, but neither flawed Milan nor United will win Champions League" is what I was going to complain about - but then reading what Gabrielle Marcotti actually wrote I stopped:

Bottom line, these are two very fragile teams right now. The difference is that I can see how United can improve, I can't really see how Milan can get much better

Admittedly he ruins it a bit by getting confused in his sentence construction and after beginning it by saying we could improve he ends it by saying we can't, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt tho...
Anyway, the point is a fair one - all our problems are problems that are solvable or came from individual bad performances on the night - we played worse than we can, Milan performed at their best. We can win it. And thus those headline writers should be less misleading.

4) And one thing the papers do get right - Rooney is pretty good, lets hope they remember this next time he gets sent off...

Boredom Killed Another

Almost 2 months since I last posted here? Jesus. A combination of simply having too much on, as well as a growing irritation with the dross that is consistently dressed up as football journalism in the national press, led me to never find the time to post.
Why return now? Simply because I'm off work this week and I've got some time so I thought I'd dip a solitary toe into the stagnant pool of football writing and see how slimy it felt...
Have I missed much? Generally avoided the papers the last couple of months, occasional glimpses of the same old stories with the same old biases, has anything changed, are we still missing Ronaldo? Are referees still right on our side? Every team we play unlucky to lose? Thought so...
A gentle start to the week anyway, not even a Man Utd story, just a few words on this story about the possibility of using play-offs for the final Champions League place:

Currently the club which finishes fourth goes through but the new proposal would mean a play-off between the clubs finishing fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh. The intention is to inject more competition into a league in which qualification has for years remained in the hands of the same four clubs.

Which idea seems the opposite of the stated intention - more competition? extending the possibility of Champions League football downward is not making more competition, but admitting defeat, saying, "there is no chance of any competition so lets give them a chance by artificially making the playing field uneven..." And when all the talk is of trying to dissuade clubs from getting into huge debts with hopes of the riches of the higher echelons isn't this idea actively encouraging them to do just that - "you've no chance of fourth no matter how much you spend, but 7th? Go on, try it, spend, spend, spend - it's only seventh..."
If you want a play-off why not get the top 4 to play off for the title?
If you want competition do something else - it really is a little lame still if the most interesting end of season competition you can muster is for the final Champions League place...