Sports Card Blogs

How many world-class players do Man Utd have this week?

Now that’s what we call the best ever, ever, ever
Mediawatch fully expected to open The Sun and find Tottenham added to the list of Teams In Crisis According To Neil Ashton after Liverpool and then Chelsea.

Instead, we find Ashton – who only ever sees the very best or very worst of everything – in the middle of another bubble of hyperbole.

‘LADS, it’s Tottenham.

‘Sir Alex Ferguson, watching on approvingly from the Wembley stands, delivered the most famous team talk in football nearly 20 years ago.’

‘The most famous team talk in football’? More famous than Alf Ramsey saying “you’ve won it once – now you’ll have to go out there and win it again” before England won the actual World Cup? More famous than the team talk Phil Brown gave to his Hull side on the actual pitch?

Of all the team talks in all the games of football, Ashton apparently believes (today, at least) that the most famous was one given by Ferguson before an unspecified home game against Tottenham. Lord knows why Ashton came up with ‘nearly 20 years ago’ as the only account we have of this team talk emerged in 2014 and it did not come with a date stamp.

Let’s remind ourselves of the full story from Roy Keane, as told in October 2014:

“It was Tottenham at home. I thought please don’t go on about Tottenham, we all know what Tottenham is about, they are nice and tidy but we’ll fucking do them. He came in and said: ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’, and that was it. Brilliant.”

Lads, it was a throwaway line to promote a book. Not an insight into ‘the most famous team talk in football’.

World-class about-turnery
According to Samuel Luckhurst of the Manchester Evening News, Jose Mourinho had ten potential or actual world-class players in July 2017. You can read about them all here but to save you the click, he named Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, David De Gea, Eric Bailly, Luke Shaw, Anthony Martial, Ander Herrera, Antonio Valencia and Marcus Rashford.

He then tweeted this in January 2018:

So that made 11. Which quite neatly is a full team.

So it was a little bizarre to see him writing in October 2018 (under the now-laughable headline of ‘Manchester United must not give in to player power by sacking Jose Mourinho’) that ‘United have one world-class player and the post-Ferguson task has broken two managers of different repute already, with a third likely’. So Mourinho had somehow lost ten world-class players in just over a year and Luckhurst was making an argument for keeping him.

Now here we are in January 2019 – with Mourinho’s sacking not looking the very worst of ideas – and what is the headline on Luckhurst’s latest piece?

‘Manchester United’s two world class players made the difference vs Tottenham’.

The numbers are creeping back up. What odds Solskjaer has a whole team of world-class players by the end of the season?

Solskjaer the new Ferguson
Of course, Samuel Luckhurst is never happier than when crowbarring Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Sir Alex Ferguson into the same headline.

‘Sir Alex Ferguson is offering advice to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on his team selections at Manchester United,’ begins a piece on Monday. Mediawatch thinks it would be a far bigger story if Ferguson were offering no advice at all – just standing with his arms folded and miming that annoying ‘lock up the mouth and throw away the key’ thing.

‘A dressing room source said the 77-year-old is assisting Solskjaer on certain team picks and player analysis ahead of games. Although the selections rest entirely with Solskjaer, the Norwegian values Ferguson’s input so much he has sounded him out for his opinion on United’s line-ups.’

‘Man consults very successful man and friend’ is quite the story. What a source. But wait, there is more evidence of his influence incoming…

‘Solskjaer has made 12 changes over the course of his five-game winning run in the Premier League and emphasised at his press conference unveiling he would rotate the team – a favourite trait of Ferguson’s.’

In other news: Jose Mourinho made 21 changes in his last five Premier League games. Was he getting advice from Fergie too?

One-man band
Anyway…two world-class players? The way John Cross tells it in the Daily Mirror, there was only one man on the pitch:

‘IT was an incredible one-man performance,’ is how he begins his match report. Which confuses the sh*t out of Mediawatch, who is not sure one man can win a game 1-0 if that man is the goalkeeper.

It’s particularly odd as Cross also did the player ratings and gave three other Manchester United players a mark of 8/10 while no Tottenham player scored more than 7/10. It doesn’t sound like a ‘one-man performance’.

Go fourth and be in crisis
Chelsea are in fourth place with the highest points tally of any fourth-placed side in the history of the English game at this stage. They are currently in four competitions. According to the form table (last six games) only Liverpool and Manchester United are in better form. And yet the media has apparently designated them a club in crisis.

This is from Tony Banks of the Daily Mirror, reporting on an actual victory:

‘OUT of the title race, a Champions League place suddenly under threat, and a League Cup semi-final deficit to make up, Chelsea need good news.’

This is now becoming really bloody confusing. Chelsea should never have even been IN a title race – they finished last season 30 points behind the champions; that is why they started the season as fourth favourites for the title.

As for ‘a Champions League place suddenly under threat’, the gap is now six points. That is the biggest gap from Chelsea to fifth place in the entirety of this season. So the idea that Chelsea are ‘suddenly under threat’ is absolute nonsense. It’s just an incredibly lazy narrative.

Meanwhile in The Sun, Neil Silver writes that ‘IF THERE is one thing that Chelsea have been known for in recent years, it is outstanding central midfielders’. Is it? Or are they mostly known for being rich and racist?

Anyway, go on…

‘Frank Lampard, Nemanja Matic, Juan Mata, Joe Cole, Michael Essien, Claude Makelele, Roberto Di Matteo,, Cesc Fabregas, and the likes of current star N’Golo Kante, to name but a few.’

There are a lot of names there already; was there really any need to pretend that Joe Cole was a central midfielder? F*** it, why not throw in Arjen Robben too?

‘So when boss Maurizio Sarri stands there criticising Jorginho, expressing regret at selling Fabregas to Monaco last week, and then says they have no cover in that key position, you have to wonder just what on earth is going on at Stamford Bridge.’

Do you? Shall we help you out? Sarri is using you to try and force through a deal for Nicolo Barella or Leandro Paredes. This is 2+2 football management. And you just added it up to make a crisis.

How low can you go?
‘WATFORD’S resemblance to a bag of Revels was evident at Selhurst Park’ – Kieran Gill, Daily Mail.

Stealing lines from Paul Merson? You’ve hit the floor, fella.

Recommended reading of the day
Jonathan Wilson on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer

Daniel Storey on Declan Rice – the real deal

Adam Bate on the Eden Hazard conundrum at Chelsea