Just hours after rounding off a dismal Premier League season with a 2-0 victory over Aston Villa, the Manchester United squad was herded onto an aeroplane bound for Kuala Lumpur for what proved a surreal post-season trip to Asia.
According to the Manchester Evening News the trip was basically doomed to fail from the start, at least from a football perspective, with a “well-placed source” claiming the players were “fuming” to be in Asia immediately after a 60-game season.
As soon as the post-season tour was confirmed, a delegation of players approached the football leadership team to “express their dismay” at having to play still more matches after a season that would drain energy and spirit from players and fans alike.
The response from the club hierarchy to warnings that players may try to “cry off” and avoid the over-14,000-mile round trip to Malaysia and Hong Kong was simply to slash the time between the final whistle at Old Trafford and chocks away at Manchester Airport.
This blunt-instrument approach to dragging the beleaguered squad around Asia – including Diogo Dalot, Andre Onana and Harry Maguire leaving the Bukit Jalil National Stadium at half-time in one game to board a private jet to Mumbai – does not seem to have been appreciated by the players.
That the MEN note that these three stars were “happy to volunteer as they got to return home earlier” says it all.
It is hard to dredge up much sympathy for a squad who under-performed so badly all season, and the endless commercial activities for sponsors such as Adidas, Tezos and Snapdragon are a last-ditch effort for the club to claw back some money for reinvestment into the squad.
But even so, the whistlestop tour at times bordered on farce – as an open-top bus carried United stars around Kuala Lumpur a United source’s insistence that it was not meant to be a victory parade for a Europa League trophy just made it sound all the more likely that it was.
After defeat to the ASEAN All Stars the Red Devils came from behind to beat Hong Kong 3-1 and secure a trophy, although its status amongst players and staff alike was beautifully illustrated by it being carried back to the dressing room by a press officer.
The MEN report “gallows humour” on the bus following the loss in the opening game and note that the booing after the game was not lost on the players, who had to wait for the referee and linesmen to be retrieved from their dressing room before the United squad could collect their silver medals.
One amongst the squad half-joked that the tour would be “like a stag do” but by all accounts the dissatisfied group didn’t achieve anything approaching debauchery, with Alejandro Garnacho, Amad and Ayden Heaven riding e-scooters paid for by locals about as crazy as it seems to have got.
The headlines have mostly been grabbed by Alejandro Garnacho’s attitude, which seems every inch that of a man desperate to leave, and he and Amad showing fans the middle finger.
Amad explained that he was responding to jibes about his mother but Garnacho – described as “surly” – gave no explanation. In news surely bordering on satire “players were advised to stop making the offensive gesture.”
That even manager Ruben Amorim “cheerfully admitted to a colleague how exhausting the post-season tour had been” illustrates just how little enthusiasm the trip generated, and what sounds like a slightly manic energy flowing through the camp.
It’s certainly a camp that will be delighted to be left to its own devices for a while, with some amongst it “already at the end of their tether with many in the squad.”
The MEN claim that “the widespread consensus is that the players do not play to their maximum in every match.” While there are mitigating circumstances as to why whipping that dead horse of a squad in the humidity of Malaysia didn’t go too well, it’s an attitude which must be stamped out ahead of the new season.
Featured image George Wood via Getty Images
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Joe Ponting
Joe has spent more than half his life writing about football and all of it following United. As a child he told a doctor his name was ‘Paul Scholes’, but could never pick a pass like him no matter how much he tried.
