Republik Of Mancunia

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• RoM Reads
• PICTURE: Ferguson treads dangerous path of self-delusion
• STATS: Danny Welbeck compared to other strikers at his age

RoM Reads Posted: 23 Aug 2014 07:27 AM PDT The Daily Mail reports on Di Maria’s absence from the Real Madrid squad yesterday. The Telegraph has an excellent interview of Louis van Gaal by Gary Neville. The Guardian reports on Louis van Gaal’s matchday press conference. Pride of All Europe discusses tactics, signings and the Glazers. The Independent looks at United’s worse ever signings.

PICTURE: Ferguson treads dangerous path of self-delusion Posted: 23 Aug 2014 07:17 AM PDT Simon Barnes, The Times. August 23rd 1995. Throughout the summer, it seemed that the FA Carling Premiership was suffering from a collective bout of insanity, the main symptom of which was the furious, compulsive spending of sums that would make a lottery winner bleed with envy. The we noticed that Manchester United were taking the opposite course. Not buying but selling: not building but dismantling. Were they the only sane club left? Or were they the loonies? United won successive league championships, and came close enough to a third last season. They did so with a team that combined flashing wing play with a line of hardness that ran right through the middle of the team, from the goalkeeper to the front line. But Alex Ferguson, the United manager, has got rid of two essential vertebrae in this spine of toughness, with the sale of Paul Ince and Mark Hughes. He also lost the better, or at least the more complete of the wings, Andrei Kanchelskis. Even without such sales, he would clearly be able to buy any player he wanted – witness his £7m purchase of Andy Cole last season. But he has not spent a cent during the close season. It was hard to understand this wilful perversity, but a single word has perhaps provided the key. The word is ‘babes.’ This is a word forever associated – in football at any rate – with one man. This is Sir Matt Busbym the legendary ‘father’ of United: Busby’s Babes, and all that. “If they’re good enough, they’re old enough,” Sir Matt said, flinging precocious talents into the front line and letting them strut their stuff. Home-grown talent, identified early, managed by someone who understood them, trusted them, and had the courage to unleash them. Is this, then, why Ferguson is not buying players, but promoting his own home-grown young talent? Is the team no longer Manchester United, but Fergie’s Babes? Perhaps Ferguson no longer seeks to be a great manager. He wants to be a legend. It is a dangerous path that he is treading. Nostalgia is sport’s eternal self-indulgence, but if anyone ever takes it seriously, to the point of believing it, he is distinctly foolish. In fact, his name is probably Trueman. If anyone actively involved in sport believes it, one is entitled to suspect that he is crazy to the point of self-destruction. Sport forever changes, and not slowly either. Will anyone ever play cricket for England football for Arsenal, as Denis Compton did? Or go the whole hog and be a double international? Will a cricketer ever again hold the world long-jump record, like C.B. Fry? Will any athlete hold a proper job and win an Olympic gold medal at a real sport? For this is what Ferguson is attempting to do with his Babes Scenario. Can a team of young men really hold their own in a game that is not faster, harder, more physically and mentally demanding than ever before? Well, what happens to the players who leap boyishly into big-time football? Think of a young man of matchless talent: a talent, it seems, to grace the game for years. Is it possible such a player, destined to be the greatest in his generation, should fade before he has grown into his full strength, drained by the ever-increasing physical and emotional demands of his trade. Yes, a name does spring to mind: Ryan Giggs, of Manchester United. It is the disease that Americans call the Sophomore Jinx: that terrible realisation that mere talent is not enough. If it can happen to the nonpareil Giggs, then it can happen – perhaps these days it must happen – to any babe that ever kicked a football. But then what else should Ferguson try and do? A few years ago, he was a man with a high and distant ambition. He wanted to restore United to their former glory. Alas, he has no fulfilled his highest hopes. He has made his place in the club’s history. Double championship? Been there, done that. Why, he even made Eric Cantona a club man: a triumph of man-management if ever there was one. What remains? The thin face remains as careworn as ever, the defensive mannerisms as awkward. But, as he attempts to step from excellence to legendary greatness, do we detect a stumble? Kenny Dalglish became Liverpool’s manager, but found following a legend – or series of legends – too much for him. Thus the club had a kind of collective nervous breakdown, abandoning its own principles and traditions. Only now is the club getting back on track. At the moment, it seems that United are following the same course. There seems to be some deep trouble there, some affliction of the heart and of the mind. This is a club, and an individual, that has found its heart’s desire. And, in doing so, has found despair.

STATS: Danny Welbeck compared to other strikers at his age Posted: 23 Aug 2014 02:00 AM PDT One of the biggest criticisms against Danny Welbeck is that for a striker he doesn’t score enough goals. Even the biggest Welbeck enthusiasts can’t argue with that. He’s scored 20 goals in the league over the past three seasons, which is still more than £50m man Fernando Torres, but nowhere near what you would expect for a quality forward. For United fans who want Welbeck sold, that strange sort of red whose mentality I genuinely don’t understand, they look at his stats and claim that he isn’t and won’t ever be United quality. Even without my bias towards Welbeck, I find it weird that anyone could look at a player at 23 and write off their future. To believe that the form of a player when they’re still years away from their peak determines what sort of player they could become seems totally barmy to me. I’m not suggesting that because a player has come up through the ranks and loves the club he deserves his place in the team regardless of how he plays, but why anyone couldn’t be a bit more patient with a player like that confuses me. Welbeck watched the European Cup final in 1999 in his front room with his family and went bonkers when we won. He grew up playing football on the streets of Longsight with Wes Brown. Ryan Giggs was his hero and he dreamed of one day getting to wear our shirt. Why wouldn’t supporters want to give a player like that a bit more time to prove themselves? At least see what he is capable of when given a fair crack of the whip. It makes you wonder whether all fans are like this and how many of them end up with egg on their face. I wasn’t watching Guingamp play in 2001 and don’t have any pals who support Ligue 1 clubs, but I wonder what those fans made of a 23-year-old Didier Drogba. Having paid £80,000 for him after he scored 5 goals in 21 appearances for Le Mans, I wonder whether they were impressed with his return of 3 goals in 11 games. With 8 goals in 32 appearances as a 23-year-old, 0.25 goals per game, I wonder how many people wrote him off. Similarly, in the year that Eric Cantona turned 23, what were Marseille fans saying about his 5 goals in 22 appearances? Granted, they probably had more to say about his poor conduct on and off the field, rather than how many times he was sticking the ball in to the back of the net, but his club were happy to palm him off to Bordeux, where he scored 6 goals in five months. Cantona was 27 before he was getting in to double figures every season. Nicolas Anelka scored 4 goals in 20 games for Liverpool when he was 23, after PSG loaned him out when he fell out with the coach, with a record of 2 goals in 12 games. Liverpool opted against signing him on a permanent basis though and went for El Hadji Diouf instead, leading Anelka to sign for City, who had just been promoted to the Premier League. Even players like Daniel Sturridge, who scored 21 goals in 29 games last season for Liverpool, couldn’t displace Torres from Chelsea’s starting line-up and scored just 1 goal in 7 appearances when he was 23. What a difference a year makes. Aged 23, Edison Cavani had a scoring rate of 0.38 goals per game, Alessandro Del Piero 0.36, Teddy Sheringham 0.33, Karim Benzema 0.3, Ian Wright 0.24, Diego Forlan (at United) 0.24 and Dwight Yorke 0.16. The list goes on. Look at all the things those players went on to achieve after the age of 23, the successes they massively contributed towards, that they just weren’t capable of when they were the age Welbeck is now. As soon as you start mentioning these sort of players, the moronic response is “ha ha, you are comparing Welbeck to Cantona/Del Piero/Cavani?!” Of course not. There are plenty of players who had a similar record to Welbeck’s who went on to have average or worse careers, and none of their names are mentioned here. Welbeck may go on to have a naff career too. But the players mentioned are irrelevant and if you can’t see that, you are missing the point entirely. At 23-years-old, you don’t know what a player will become. Drogba was useless at 23 and ten years later he had been instrumental to a club winning the European Cup, several Premier League titles, several FA Cups and several League Cups. Guingamp fans would have likely laughed at the notion of this. I’ll repeat, I’m not saying Welbeck will emulate Drogba, simply that some players fulfil potential later than others. It stands to reason that if all these players excelled after the age of 23, there’s every possibility the same could apply to Welbeck. Last season Danny Welbeck played 25 games for United and scored 9 goals, which is a rate of 0.36 goals per appearance. As the season drew to a close, only three players had a better goals per minute rate than Welbeck (excluding penalties). In the six games that Welbeck started in the league over the Christmas period in the absence of Robin van Persie, Welbeck scored six goals. The season before last, Welbeck played on the wing in almost every game he played. You would still imagine a winger should score more goals and he didn’t have a great season when out of position, but that shouldn’t be used as a stick to beat him with. If we are to judge him as a striker, then how effective he was as a winger is irrelevant. If Welbeck is given a regular run in the team and fails to deliver, then fair enough, he can be lumped in with the players who showed potential at his age but didn’t score enough goals, and probably have an average career. If Welbeck isn’t given a regular run in the team, then he will leave at the end of the season anyway. But wanting him sold now, this summer, is madness. The papers are reporting that Louis van Gaal has told Welbeck he can leave this summer and three clubs that finished above United last season, Arsenal, Spurs and Everton, are all keen on signing him. When this story was presented to the manager at yesterday’s press conference, he lost his temper. He claimed that only he knew what had been said between him and Welbeck, whilst the media were just guessing, and that it was a private matter. Sooner or later, the fans that want rid of Welbeck will probably get their way. When some non-Manc mercenary comes in his place, who couldn’t care less about the club, doesn’t give 100% in every game and has a similar scoring record, we can all rejoice. Until then, I know I won’t be alone in being absolutely delighted every time our Danny sticks in the back of the net. “It's what every Manchester boy dreams of. Growing up, you just want to play for United but to score for them was out of this world. There's no better club than United."

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