When the actual Manchester United manager describes his team as “the worst team maybe in the history of Manchester United” then you absolutely do not need to twist those quotes; you just say thank you very much and move on.
Every single national newspaper barring the Daily Mirror – who led on Tottenham and Ange Postecoglou – splashed that story across their back pages on Monday morning.
But what’s better than the actual Manchester United manager denigrating his own team? According to MailOnline, it’s this:
‘Man United are ‘WORSE’ under Ruben Amorim than they were with Erik ten Hag says Alan Shearer – as the pundit explains what the squad ‘can’t do”
Why the actual f*** are you capitalising the word ‘WORSE’ as if it were a powerful revelation when these are actual facts?
Manchester United picked up 11 points from Erik ten Hag’s nine Premier League games in charge this season; they have picked up 11 points from Ruben Amorim’s 11 Premier League games in charge this season. That is worse. Not ‘WORSE’.
Amorim does not need Alan Shearer to tell him these home truths and neither do Manchester United fans or players; he made that clear with his own very powerful quotes.
‘Alan Shearer weighed in on Man United’s struggles under Ruben Amorim after the Red Devils suffered an embarrassing 3-1 home defeat by Brighton on Sunday.
‘The Newcastle legend argued that they are worse under the Portuguese boss than they were with Erik ten Hag, who was given the boot in October as United languished 14th place in the Premier League table.’
He didn’t have to ‘argue’ anything; it is objectively true.
And as for ‘explaining’ what the Manchester United squad ‘can’t do’, here is that insight in full: “They can’t play the way he wants to play. The players just can’t do it.”
That’s not an ‘explanation’ by any stretch of even limited imagination. Our beef is not with Alan Shearer – he is not claiming to be a managerial expert; he can’t after this – but a media which makes his anodyne words somehow the most important story in football.
But when a manager gives you such a perfect quote for a perfect headline, sometimes the challenge can be to take things further, which is how we stumbled upon this headline on Google from The Independent:
‘Ruben Amorim was wrong – Man Utd are the worst team in the world’
Now when you click through the headline swiftly changes to ‘Ruben Amorim was wrong – but pound for pound, Manchester United are the worst team in the world’, which is a much, much fairer representation of what was written by Senior Football Correspondent Richard Jolly, formerly and briefly of this parish.
The Independent have served the shorter headline to Google to generate clicks – and in this case, it worked – while knowing full well it’s a right load of bollocks. There’s a reason why that version appears nowhere on their website.
United are not even the worst team in the Premier League, never mind the whole world, and actually Jolly gives Amorim a history lesson on Manchester United’s various relegations and failures. What he does write is this:
‘Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, euro for euro, United are arguably the worst team in the world.’
Fair. They cost a shedload of money and they are currently 13th in the Premier League table.
You know what they’re not? The ‘worst team in the world’. Nobody sane would say that. Nobody sane would write that. Makes a great headline for Google, mind.
Over at the Mirror, they claim that the defeat to Brighton meant that ‘Ruben Amorim discovers FOUR things he must immediately fix to solve Man Utd crisis’.
We very much like the idea that Amorim was labouring under the misapprehension that his lower-mid-table Manchester United side was actually fine until he ‘discovered’ there were four issues.
It turns out he has ‘discovered’ (some would say a little late) that 1) he probably needs a new left wing-back because he doesn’t actually have a functioning one. So there’s that. Thankfully they are in the middle of buying one.
At 2), it turns out that he must ‘immediately fix’ the fact that he must ‘stick to his guns’. Sounds like a philosophical nightmare.
At 3) he must ‘immediately fix’ that Manchester United are over-reliant on Bruno Fernandes for creativity. It absolutely sounds like something he can sort by Thursday.
And finally, he must ‘immediately fix’ the fact that Rasmus Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee are low on confidence, using ‘whatever magic he has’. Oh he has ‘magic’? Shame he has only just ‘discovered’ he might need to use it.
