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that was an excellent post PBFT
this makes me chuckle some more
Wayne Rooney has a point about where Manchester United are headingWayne Rooney is right. Manchester United no longer have the means to match the ambition and wealth of their rivals
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Paul Wilson at Old Trafford guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 October 2010 22.10 BST Article history
When Wayne Rooney signed for Manchester United in 2004, no one thought Sir Alex Ferguson would outlast him at the club. Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images
Absent in spirit from Old Trafford and absent in person, Wayne Rooney at least gave his erstwhile public something of himself with a statement issued around two hours before kick-off. The timing alone must have angered Sir Alex Ferguson, but what of the substance of Rooney's remarks? Can Manchester United really be said to lack ambition and are they now so financially hamstrung they can no longer compete in the transfer market?
A glance at the teamsheet for the Bursaspor game would suggest the answers might be yes and yes. Federico Macheda up front and Bebé alongside Gabriel Obertan on the bench hardly sent out a message of strength to the rest of Europe and, even if Ferguson had attacking insurance in Dimitar Berbatov and Javier Hernández, one of those strikers is only just starting to show his true capabilities and the other is only just starting. Take Rooney out of the equation, as United found to their cost at the business end of last season, and the frontline begins to flatline.
While that may not be entirely Ferguson's fault, it is not down to Rooney either. One could argue that the player is being entirely consistent in his reasoning, having chosen United over Everton precisely because they could match his ambitions. Now it appears they cannot, either in terms of buying top players or the unstated matter of paying astronomical wages, and it is difficult for Ferguson to counter that argument because it is precisely what the fans have been saying for the past few years.
Cleverly, the Rooney camp has effectively joined the anti-Glazer protest. The manager sided with the owners out of loyalty to the club, even though not even MUTV believes the tightened purse strings have anything to do with lack of value in the market, and his star player has called his bluff. Rooney may not be perceived as sharp enough to do all this on his own but the point is that he is not acting alone. He is being guided by an agent, Paul Stretford, who makes it his business to know exactly how much clubs are able to spend. Always has been. Ask Everton.
Six years ago when precocious of Croxteth marked his United debut with a sparkling hat-trick against Fenerbahce it was not just Wayne's world that was full of promise but his new club's. English football had a new leading light, David Beckham and the 1999 treble were gliding out of view amid confidence that the new century would bring United just as much glory, and even the massively extended Old Trafford was living up to its billing as a theatre of dreams.
José Mourinho and Chelsea soon put a stop to such reverie but United thought they had overcome that interruption after a couple of seasons. Managers who last three years, no matter how flashy and successful, are mere irritations to an empire built on longevity. As might be expected of a club where the manager's unchallenged supremacy is measured in decades, United are accustomed to taking the long view.
That was why they spent £27m on a teenager in the first place. Rooney may not have been produced at the club, like Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, but if he was the foremost talent in England no one else was going to have him. Even at that price Rooney would be a bargain if he stayed at United until his old age and kept filling his boots as joyously as he did on debut.
Now he is not going to do that, there are no certainties any more, apart from recognising that Rooney evidently intends to carry on filling his boots. If United cannot keep their best players and Rooney follows Carlos Tevez and Cristiano Ronaldo out of the club, how will they persuade replacements of the necessary calibre to join them?
Were Rooney 18 again, would it be United breaking the bank to snatch him, or would it be Manchester City or Chelsea? No one is pretending that United, who won only the Carling Cup last season, have begun this one in a manner calculated to worry their monied rivals. If Ferguson is really "dumbfounded" over why his star player should want to play his trade elsewhere, then how is the next manager going to sell United's superiority over the hard cash and more obvious ambition of rivals?
Ferguson was planning for a future way beyond his retirement date when he invested in Rooney, placing a constant at the club that would serve as a peg on which to hang a successful team for years to come. The parent outlasting the adopted son was completely unforeseen, which explains the palpable sense of shock in Ferguson's unburdening statement.
You might never have guessed it from the extensive list of Ferguson victories that has been endlessly trotted out over the past week – the rout of Jaap Stam, the war of Beckham's eyebrow, the banishment of Roy Keane and so on – but this is a manager who is 69 at the end of the year and one who has said he intends to step down in the next couple of seasons.
This battle is lost already, there is no time for more teambuilding, and from the sound of it no money either, although Ferguson and the owners deny that. While Ferguson will always talk a good fight and do his utmost for the club, when it comes to being hard-nosed he may just have met his match. Loyalty, as they say in the newspaper industry and doubtless many others, is what they shaft you with.
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"It felt like a really pointless version of ketamine: no psychedelic effects, no pleasant slide into rubbery nonsense, just a sudden drop off the cliff of wrongness."
"i'm gonna wreck you so bad we're going to have to change church"
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