Why was Bruno put on a pedestal that McFred never managed? What kind of collective mental illness prevented fans from seeing he was just as shit as them?
It's in United fan's nature to want a hero/messiah tbh, and people wanted to believe he was that guy. It's even happened (prematurely IMO) with the manager since his appointment was announced.
I mean, there was seemingly a 'collective mental illness' in Bruno's early months from many football watchers who continuously drew comparisons with 'another United number 18', despite the fact that the two players could not be more different and there was never any indication of Bruno being the new Scholes. Football opinions are often formed lazily and sold wholesale. Many people seemingly don't have the capacity to watch a football match, or a series of football matches, and trust the fact that they have watched hundreds of them over the years and form their own opinions. It seems as if people don't even know what they think about something until they read twitter.
And then also, a large part of that laziness is distilling football to a pure statistical analysis. Bruno had great numbers. Common sense would ordinarily tell anyone that you cannot determine the quality of a player based on how many penalties he scores, but that was absent, and it was just a constant presentation of numbers. Others, I feel, actually took the time to watch the game and analyse a performance.
It's all about perspective. It is not that the things that are being complained about now were not mentioned then. It was just that people's need for a hero saw them choose to wilfully ignore things that they have been proven to not like. We've all been on here for many years. People don't actually like when players, particularly midfield players, give the ball away a lot. At the time, they said that they didn't mind because at least Bruno was 'trying things'. I knew, and said, that it will be almost all of a sudden that those same people will start to mind because the reality is they don't actually like it. We just needed the initial period to pass before we could get to a more objective analysis.
You mentioned a pedestal that McFred has never managed, but you can go back to earlier McTominay threads and see that was not the case. In fact, I believe even yourself was a great champion of his a while back. From the very beginning, I was concerned about his poor passing. I remember coming into performance threads right after he had displayed terrible passing, and voicing this, only for the conversation to be totally different because at the particular time - people were seemingly no yet ready to simply assess him as a footballer. It was mixed with the hope of what they wanted him to be. He was definitely elevated massively, people said he was worth £80m, in the top few midfielders in the league, and one of the best players to ever come from our academy. The thing is, he could not pass the ball then either. It's only that people, all of a sudden, care that he cannot - so it is only now reasonable in their eyes to criticise it, whereas anyone who did so before was just being contrarian.