How dare England manager drop my mate?

Sarah Winterburn

The grand old puke of Yorke
Former Manchester United players are closing ranks around Wayne Rooney. While Bryan Robson is on the back page of The Sun saying that Manchester United fans “will show him the love and respect he deserves”, Dwight Yorke is seething:

“People forget he’s the greatest English player and the goals he has scored.”

They really, really don’t, Dwight; literally nobody ever forgets. We’d like to but no f***er will let us.

“It’s a real difficult time because he’s asked to play all these different positions and gets all the flak he does, yet he tries his hardest every single game.”

And like a child struggling to master the recorder (and getting paid £300,000 a week to do so), all we really want from the captain of England and Manchester United is that he tries his hardest. And that he does it in a different room.

“Then you get people like Gareth Southgate taking him out of the team because of the pressure from the media and I think that’s wrong especially coming off the back of a positive result.”

‘People like Gareth Southgate’? You mean the England boss? You mean Wayne Rooney’s international manager? And yes, a 2-0 win over Malta is technically a ‘positive result’, but…

“Sometimes you have to show people a little faith and for Gareth Southgate to make that call, well I thought that was a little strange.”

A little faith? Rooney last started a qualifier on the bench in 2003. That’s 13 years of a whole lot of faith.

“To then put him in front of the media to face the music and say he isn’t going to play was disrespectful and a disgrace in my opinion.”

Except, well, Rooney himself asked to face the media. We know because he said this: “It was important to get my opinion across ­because, if I didn’t, a lot of stuff could have been written or said without me having my opinion. We [he and Southgate] spoke about it and I felt it was the right thing to do because, with me, things do get blown out of proportion at times.”

Indeed they do, Wayne. Indeed they do.

 

Mediawatch rewind
From Dwight Yorke’s column in March:

“For Manchester United now there is no candidate out there. You have to accept that Jose Mourinho has been a great manager but if there is a change of manager at Manchester United and Van Gaal goes then it will be Ryan Giggs.”

Next week: Why Nicky Butt should be the new Home Secretary.

 

Right of reply
Robbie Savage responds to criticism of his Ryan Giggs column by readers and sections of the media here.

 

Slightly misleading SEO-centric headline of the day
‘Gareth Bale to Manchester United: Real Madrid superstar to sign new contract at the Bernabeu until 2022’ – The Sun website.

So not Gareth Bale to Manchester United at all, then.

 

Shock of the new
‘Pogba tops shirt sales charts with shock Man Utd entry making top ten’ is the ‘trending’ story on the Metro’s football pages on Thursday morning.

Who could this ‘shock Man Utd entry’ be? Marouane Fellaini? Ashley Young? Marcos Rojo?

No, the ‘incredible’ entry in the top ten is one Marcus Rashford, the brightest young prospect at one of the biggest clubs in the world.

Reeling, aren’t you?

 

You know it’s international week when…
‘JOE HART wants to make up for his Euro 2016 cock-ups’ – The Sun’s back page. Yes, back sodding page.

We might have been vaguely interested if Joe Hart had said “what cock-ups? I thought I was f***ing brilliant…”.

 

Can we kick it?
‘Manchester United are in line for a hefty cash windfall should England international Michael Keane leave Burnley,’ writes Sami Mokbel in the Daily Mail, who claim that ‘the Old Trafford club have an agreement entitling them to as much as 20 percent of the profit on Keane’s next transfer’.

Which will come as something of a surprise to the ‘United insider’ who told The Sun website’s Daniel Cutts less than a week ago that Manchester United ‘are “kicking themselves” for NOT putting a sell-on clause in £25m-rated new England defender Michael Keane’s contract when he moved to Burnley’.

The only thing we know for certain is that Michael Keane is not an England international. Silly Sami.

 

Do the maths
‘Manchester United facing £26m Wayne Rooney dilemma as they ponder ditching him next summer’ is the headline on the Daily Mirror website as they suggest that the club captain is surplus to requirements with 20 months remaining on a £300,000-a-week contract.

And then it takes a tumble in The Sun spin machine and hey presto:

‘Wayne Rooney could leave in summer as Manchester United consider paying £26million to cancel £300,000-a-week contract.’

If they were ‘considering paying £26million to cancel his £300,000-a-week contract’ next summer, they might want to get new batteries for their calculator; they’ll ‘only’ owe him about £16m.

 

Asking the big, important questions

Ah, so that’s what they do with your 100 quid a month…

 

How low can you go?
Looking deeper into that Sky Sports story reveals a Liverpool and Manchester United combined XI. Now you will see many more of these over the next few days – and we published one here – but we suspect Sky will be the first (and hopefully last) to construct an XI ‘according to Twitter mentions’. See that shark? Kris Kross would be proud.

We’re just surprised they didn’t consider it a ‘shock’ that Marcus Rashford was included…

 

Liverpool v Man United: It starts here
To be fair, we’re all building up to Monday’s massive clash and it’s a race to get the big scoops early. MailOnline are on it:

‘Manchester United’s Juan Mata takes break from preparing for Liverpool clash to meet fans at fragrance launch.’

‘Liverpool stars looking sharp ahead of Manchester United clash as Jurgen Klopp’s men pose in Hugo Boss suits.’

‘Liverpool players gear up for crucial Monday night clash with Manchester United as Jurgen Klopp’s men adopt unusual stretching exercises.’

How unusual? Let’s hope they took their suits off first.

 

Elsewhere on MailOnline…

‘Liverpool keeper Mignolet puts flat season behind him to open up coffee shop in his native Belgium.’

The season is seven games old; was that small oversight really worth the ‘joke’?