Hooray! It’s another season!
An air of joy and goodwill has infected the pod ahead of the new season; it can only be José Mourinho’s joie de vivre and bonhomie. Well, it is less than a month since France won the World Cup! On the show this week Ed & Paul look back on United’s pre-season in the US, discuss transfers, or the lack of, preview the coming season, and look ahead to the Reds’ fixture against Leicester City on Friday night.
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We’ve had the rest, great to have the best back. (Can’t agree about Ozil however: German when he wants to play for a national team with a chance of winning tournaments, Turkish when he wants to pose for pictures with politicians who made a failed military coup look like a lost liberal alternative to oppression; and Turkish also when he wants everyone to know where his cultural affiliation and identity really resides. Maybe Ozil was singled out for blame that should have been shared with his teammates and manager, but he brought about that disconnect with the German public himself.)
The Guardian, Mirror and Telegraph have all run the same story in the last 24 hours so have all had the same briefing by United: the reason the club did’t do more business in the transfer window is because the board didn’t like the look of the business Mourinho wanted to do. Namely, selling off younger players the manager has fallen out with, and shelling out saw-you-coming money for 29-32 year olds.
Thank god then for Woodward stopping Mourinho from doing even more damage. A chequebook manager can be tolerated in the short term if their acquisitions work out; this chequebook manager dropped his own signing Pogba for Fellaini against Sevilla, and dropped his own signings Bailly and Lindelof for Smalling and match-loser Jones against Chelsea at Wembley. He bought then froze out and sold Mkhitaryan, and bought and renumerated ridiculously Sanchez, who was then complete shit and fucked up the momentum of at least 4 other players in the process. And this chequebook manager has previous: for Martial read Salah and De Bruyne.
It seems Woodward has woken up then, and realised that backing this manager this summer was not actually a good idea. Woodward needs a manager he can trust, not just to pick correctly who to keep/buy and sell/loan, but trust not to find a way of publicly insulting your player for managing to win the World Cup (some achievement that, even for the man who gave us Eva Carneiro and football heritage), not to trash academy players for not being the first team squad members you should only have to breath the same air as, and not to ridicule supporters for being gullible enough to pay to watch pre-season friendlies.
Never mind Guardiola; Klopp > Mourinho and everyone knows it, the Portuguese included. When he takes his feel bad-factor with him at some point over the next 12 months, Woodward needs to get the recruitment right for a change, and yes Zidane is the man I’d like to see.
as im sure you know in this age of digital media the timing of your podcasts are always late with regards to matches and incidents. you are far from being the world s favourite utd podcast now. please get your acts together
That’s right we’ll get our act together on this FREE podcast which has been brought to you absolutely FREE for 348 episodes. Did I mention its free entertainment?
Weekly podcast. My arse. Look forward to it each week. Lol
Fuck off 🙂