FineYoungCasual
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Article from the Guardian on Saturday, apologies if it's already been posted...
http://gu.com/p/3n7db
http://gu.com/p/3n7db
Manchester United have stopped working under David Moyes
The club will kill the manager with kindness, right up until they decide the whole episode has been a mistake - Paul Wilson
The Manchester United manager, David Moyes, reacts during the Champions League last-16 first leg defeat at Olympiakos. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images
This should be one of Manchester United's better weekends in a difficult season. They have no game. When hostilities resume on SaturdayDavid Moyes and his beleaguered players will find themselves at thequenelle-free zone of West Bromwich Albion, which, by an unhappy coincidence, is where Sir Alex Ferguson took his bows at the end of last season, when a highly untypical 5-5 draw was put down to the champions being either demob happy or distracted by the emotions surrounding the great helmsman's departure.
Ferguson had made his decision on the succession by then. The chosen one was wrapping up the season with Everton at Stamford Bridge and preparing himself for his first public appearances in a Manchester United blazer. It seemed a sound enough plan. Bathed in May sunshine at The Hawthorns, Ferguson could have had no inkling of how suddenly and spectacularly it would start to go wrong. United were a winning machine, an institution at the top level of English football, a champion club with unimpeachable kudos that leading players wanted to join. All you had to do to keep up the steady run of success was appoint a competent manager – Moyes was certainly that – and make sure the club understood that he might not immediately replicate Ferguson but would get there if granted enough time.
Ostensibly the club are still sticking to that line, but what was not so easy to envisage in May was the extent to which good intentions would be undermined by rank performances. The players should take a proportion of the blame for events on the pitch, but the task of a manager is to get the best out of his players – an area in which Ferguson excelled to an extent only now being recognised – and if Moyes cannot supervise a more recognisable impression of a football team than the one that turned up in Athens in midweek it is legitimate to question the point of having him around. While all managers lose games, some games are lost in a way that reflects poorly on the manager, and to put it as kindly as possible Moyes is clearly not having the effect on his players that José Mourinho is at Chelsea or Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool.
United are backing him for now, of course they are, they will continue to kill him with kindness right up to the point where they unplug the support mechanism and decide that the whole episode has been a mistake. That, in turn, involves acceptance that Ferguson might have made an error of judgment, which is why Moyes is getting to play the dangling man for longer than most other managers would be permitted. But no matter how compassionate the club wants to be, no matter how much it reveres Ferguson and hopes to see his planned legacy come to fruition, a decision will have to be made soon because Manchester United has stopped working. Moyes is not just experiencing difficulty turning the ocean liner around, he has the vessel headed for the shore. While Wayne Rooney has been placated at extraordinary expense, Robin van Persie is now sounding mutinous. It may be a while before the inoffensive Juan Mata does the same, but the £37m signing's initial impact has been negligible and his move to Manchester has not resulted in a recall to the Spain squad. Marouane Fellaini, Moyes's other major signing, was not considered worth an outing against Olympiakos, while the talented Adnan Januzaj was inexplicably left out in favour of Ashley Young and Tom Cleverley.
None of this would matter too much were there any signs of improvement or progress, some hint that Moyes has a plan in mind or is working steadily towards an achievable goal, but he responds to each new humiliation with the same perplexed expression of pain and surprise that the supporters are beginning to adopt. The rather lofty suggestion from earlier in the season that United could afford to miss out on the Champions League once in a while has now been replaced by the stark realisation that if they carry on in this manner they might never get back in. They will certainly find it harder to attract the best players once out of that elite, and could even struggle to keep hold of the good ones already at the club. While it may be the case that United have accepted the need for a thorough overhaul and are prepared to buy big in summer, Moyes is not necessarily the man they would want spending their money and neither does he project the sort of magnetic personality that players are drawn towards.
The new United manager may never be able to replicate the old one, even with an infinite amount of time. The infinite number of monkeys with typewriters busy on the Hamlet script might get there first.
Not that unlimited time is ever available in football anyway, thoughts at a club of United's standing are bound to turn to damage limitation. For if Moyes is not the man to run United in the way Ferguson thought he could, time alone is not going to come to his rescue and could easily make things worse. The statisticians who keep claiming that Moyes has actually made a better start to his United career than Ferguson, winning 22 of his first 41 games against 17 by his predecessor, are missing a couple of important points. The first is that Ferguson took over a team of drinkers who were struggling at the wrong end of the table, whereas Moyes inherited a side that won the league by 11 points. The second is that Ferguson was given time because he appeared to know where he wanted to go and how to get there, even if results did not immediately improve, and having tried most alternatives the United directors were at their wits' end as to where to look for someone else. That is vastly different from the present situation, which has come about because with practically the whole of the coaching profession available for interview but disregarded, United plumped for a manager who seems to be at his own wits' end far too often.
