Ryan Giggs

I really hope the despicable bastard falls flat on his face

Proudest moment of my career. The team would aim to play an exciting brand of football: "It is my philosophy and it is Manchester United's philosophy.Bla bla bla. Cmon Norwich !!!!

I read an article on the BBC site suggesting he could be like Guardiola. Maybe he'll be as bald,perhaps? Or possibly he'll go on to manage teams that were already winning which makes him look better...

He was immensely proud today - pity he's such a dimwit  .

Makes me piss my sides listening to United fans on TS.....it's as if they have suddenly found some kind of form......welcome back Ryan, oh, and your CEO has approached Van Gaal as the next manager...well done today!

Stan Collytwat asked a United tonight after they were raving about United's performance:

"So, tell me why with Phil Neville, Giggs and Butt as coaches, United couldn't get a result to save their life?"

Silence...

"Is it down to the fact that Scholes is the mastermind behind it?"

Silence..................

"Come on, you had the whole of the current coaching staff in place when Moyes was the manager, what's changed? Maybe the players just couldn't be bothered now Ferguson has retired, maybe they didn't have any respect for a manager who has been in the game for 13 years?" "Maybe they're to blame for not giving the players the right coaching and motivation, but now the scapegoat has gone and there's only 4 games to go, they suddenly now want to play for their place?"

"Well I'll tell you something, Van Gaal won't stand for it and will already be looking at what went on for the past 3 months and will have identified who's let the club down...so if they think today's performance will get them off the hook, they're in for a big shock"


Sort of sums up United and where they stand right now...not only as a team, but as a club........completely disrespectful from top to bottom.

Yep right on Blue Boy.  You would have thought they'd whipped Real Madrid 4-0 wouldn't you - and it was relegation fodder Norwich.  Poor Norwich - I hope they escape the drop.

Uniturd have got 47 out if their 60 points
from bottom 1/2 clubs
I think they have lost virtually all of their
games against top 6 clubs

Utd are bottom feeders
Who knew?

Listening to all these rags did they just beat Barcelona 4-0? Oh no it was a shit Norwich team. Jokers the lot of them.

Great piece by Taggert's biographer Patrick Collins, sort of sums up the whole United personna and where they now find themselves:

David Moyes had scarcely left the premises when his professional obituary was delivered by a radio phone-in caller. In flat, dogmatic, Northern vowels, ‘Simon’ said: ‘He was way out of his depth. He was a white van driver given the keys to a Ferrari.’ It was a crass little line, yet in some curious fashion it caught the mood of the moment.

For there was a casual cruelty in the air. Having lost his job, Moyes could not be allowed to retain his dignity. The bookies were swiftly off the mark; sharp-elbowed charlatans, rushing to the nearest microphone to bark their odds and air their views.

They were beaten to the punch by one of their own, the odious chancer who paid a stooge to dress up as the Grim Reaper and sit close by the dugout at Moyes’s final match as manager of Manchester United.

And the luvvies were hot on their heels. Eamonn Holmes, a professional United fan, was pompously patronising. ‘I’m sure David Moyes is a nice man,’ he drivelled. ‘But he just didn’t understand our team and our players didn’t understand him.’

Jeremy Vine, another minor showbiz figure with a penchant for footy, delivered this satirical gem: ‘Please Manchester United, in the name of good sense and decency, do not sack David Moyes. Signed: fans of Chelsea, Man City and Liverpool.’

More cruelty, you see. The fact that Moyes is a palpably decent man who was enduring the most traumatic days of his professional life was quite irrelevant.

He had been relieved of his power and his influence. So he was seen as a legitimate target by every attention seeker in town. And the people who created this  climate of cheap spite and petty bullying are the people charged with running the affairs of our most important football club.

Manchester United’s place among the elite of the English game has remained essentially unchallenged for more than half a century. Just as Barcelona believes it is ‘Mes que un club’, more than a club, so United could make the same boast without serious challenge.

It is a tradition established in the distant days of Matt Busby’s Babes and the disaster which erased a golden generation. The legend was reinforced by the recovery from tragedy, the manner in which an even more illustrious club arose from the ashes of Munich. Men like Busby and Bobby Charlton achieved almost mythic status, and their graceful humility set a beguiling tone.

Other clubs would enjoy passages of greater success; indeed, there were extended periods when the team from the Mersey would soar far beyond United’s reach.

There were also occasions when the club fell below its own standards; Sir Matt’s indulgence of George Best’s excesses was damaging, the long-term succession to Busby was haplessly mishandled, while only the most deluded dreamers regard the 26 years of Sir Alex  Ferguson as a time when civilised principles were unfailingly observed.

And yet, United’s appeal grew, the club became more successful, more astonishingly prosperous with every passing year. For, despite all the lapses and all the shortcomings, the romantic legend remained intact.

There were those who privately wondered how the hierarchy might react to relatively hard times; a year when a Champions League place was withheld, when revenues, however marginally, would start to slip, and when there were no  trophies to parade in the spring sunshine at season’s end. Well, now they know.

United’s behaviour over the past few months — and most notably over this past week — has been as shabby as even the meanest of their competitors. There was no great surprise in the dismissal of Moyes; somebody suggested that Chelsea, for instance, would have sacked him three times over by now.

But Manchester United are not Chelsea. They preach patience, they think long-term, and they respect and support the man they have chosen to be their manager. Or, at least, they used to.

Their handling of Moyes’s departure was shameful. It wasn’t merely the fact that the media were briefed more than half a day before the manager himself was told, although that was utterly unacceptable.

It wasn’t even the curt, bloodless, screaming insincerity of the notice which they posted on the United  website: ‘Manchester United has announced that David Moyes has left the club. The club would like to place on record its thanks for the hard work,  honesty and integrity he brought to the role.’

No, it was the way in which the mischievous morsels of propaganda had emerged over the past, few, sterile months. We learned that he was ‘out of his depth’, that he had been  ‘promoted beyond his level of competence’. We were told, in that witless phrase, that he had ‘lost the dressing room’.

Details emerged of a fundamental disagreement between the manager and a group  of partying players including, it was said,  Tom Cleverley and Ashley Young. Can you imagine: Cleverley and Young!

I mentioned Chelsea; neither of those  players would come within a  mile of Chelsea’s first team. Or that of Manchester City. Or Liverpool. The same might be said of the likes of Chris Smalling, Shinji Kagawa and Phil Jones, yet this is the dressing room which apparently found Moyes so unpalatable.

A few months ago, a Premier League manager went off the record to offer his views on  United’s demise. ‘When Fergie left, you could hear a sigh of relief through the squad,’ he said. ‘He’d nagged them, bawled at them, frightened them.

Then, suddenly, he was gone. And you could almost hear them say: “Thank God for that. Now we’ll get a bit of peace”. So they took their eye off the ball, they relaxed by maybe one per cent when the new man came in. And in the Premier League, one per cent is all it takes.’

So the rewriting of history gets under way. We are told that Ferguson should not have been allowed to choose his successor. But if not Ferguson, then who?

Ed Woodward, perhaps; an investment banker who now rejoices in the title of  ‘executive vice-chairman’? Or the monstrous regiment of Glazers, owners who at one stage loaded £716.5million of debts upon a hitherto debt-free club.

United’s debt now stands at a trivial £356.6m. Perhaps the brothers might like to explain it, as they are currently making a rare visit to Manchester to take Critical Decisions?

Ferguson himself does not emerge well from the affair. The suggestion that he rather relished Moyes’s lack of success is clearly preposterous, but he could have given his chosen candidate louder and more vigorous public  support than he was willing to offer.

And so we play the game of guessing the successor. Louis van Gaal is allegedly the leading candidate, on the basis that he is relatively available.

Since Van Gaal has been ‘relatively available’ for just about every  leading Premier League job in the past  decade, we shall believe it only when he turns up at Old Trafford.

But we do know that David Moyes has gone. And with him goes the romantic fallacy that Manchester United are different, that they observe different standards and play to  different rules.

We wanted to believe that they were something more than a ‘brand’, a vehicle for selling red shirts in South-East Asia.  But we were wrong. For there was a time when Old Trafford simply reeked with class. These days, the stench is quite different.

Very good Blue

Not sure about the last comment though
There has been an awful stench for the last 30 yrs