On Ronaldo, Piers Morgan and accusations of mentally-weak snowflakes at Manchester United

We started reading Piers Morgan’s column on Love Island, Ronaldo and Manchester United in The Sun and didn’t get any further…
Piers Morgan’s UNCENSORED Sun column begins in predictably ludicrous fashion:
‘If you had a choice of role models for your children, who would you choose between Cristiano Ronaldo and a Love Island contestant?’
Why the f*** would you be choosing? That’s the first question. There are a whole plethora of potential role models in this world – Greta Thunberg, Beyonce, the bassist from HAIM, pretty much everybody who works in the public sector – so why would you be choosing between a hard-working but ego-driven athlete and some reality show contestants?
‘One is the greatest footballer in history and a supremely dedicated athlete with an astonishingly intensive work ethic and health regime.’
Apropos of nothing, Piers Morgan and Ronaldo are friends.
‘The other, and I’m talking generally, but I fear accurately, here, is a lazy, spoiled, deluded halfwit who thinks – sadly, with some justification these days – that success and fame can be achieved by behaving like a brain-dead lecherous tool on TV.’
Does somebody want to tell Morgan about the suicides of two former contestants as well as host Caroline Flack? Or does he know and not give a shit? We suspect the latter.
‘Yet, horrifyingly, many young people are gravitating towards Love Island lifestyle choices, sensing it’s a damn sight easier than actually working for a living, or developing and nurturing a genuine talent.
‘To them, racking up social media ‘likes’ for their vacuous antics is the only validation they need to think they’ve ‘made it.’
‘I thought of this depressing reality when I heard the entirely unsurprising news that Ronaldo wants to quit Manchester United because he doesn’t think the club shares his ferocious ambition.’
That’s some world-class conflation, right there.
‘Ronaldo still has incredible hunger, desire, ambition and will to win raging inside his soul like a spewing volcano, which is staggering for someone who is now 37 and has already achieved so much in the game.
‘But there are numerous ‘stars’ wearing the shirt at the club now, and banking huge cheques each week for rankly mediocre performances, whose only real passion, hunger and desire seems to be for self-promotional off-field activities, Twitter/Instagram affirmation, and partying – not putting in the hard yards that it takes to be winners.
‘They’re the football equivalent of Love Islanders, a show you can bet your life they all avidly watch.’
Imagine looking for Twitter affirmation…
‘You have good abdominals.’
Thank you, @Cristiano. 👍
Yours aren’t too bad either. pic.twitter.com/mj3xMRBnFx— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 18, 2019
In all seriousness, this is classic old man shouting at clouds territory here, all of which boils down to ‘they don’t know they’re born’, handily wrapped up in a package of shooting-fish-in-a-barrel Love Island talk and hero worship of an unlikely footballer friend.
‘And to those ludicrous football writers trying to make out HE was the problem last season, let me remind them that Ronaldo scored 24 goals including six in the Champions League and 18 in the Premier League, coming 3rd in the Golden Boot competition and beating England’s top striker Harry Kane with one more league goal, despite being nine years older.’
And let us remind you that Manchester United finished the season four places lower, having scored 16 fewer Premier League goals, than they had without Ronaldo the season before. Bruno Fernandes, Marcus Rashford and Edinson Cavani all contributed significantly fewer goals after the arrival of Ronaldo.
‘He wasn’t the ‘problem’ – he was the only thing stopping United from battling relegation.’
Utter, utter nonsense. Is there anything more reductive than the ‘take away his goals…’ argument, as if no other f***er would have scored any.
‘The real problem was the shockingly unmotivated collection of ineffectual, mentally weak wastrels around him.
‘Why should Ronaldo waste another second of his phenomenally valuable time and talent trying to elevate a bunch of over-paid, pampered, prima donna spoiled brats to his level when so many of them just aren’t interested?’
That’s just horrible on so many levels. These are human beings. ‘Mentally weak’? Really? You can criticise a lack of footballing ability and certainly a lack of coaching at the club but Harry Maguire did not turn like a tanker because he is ‘mentally weak’; Aaron Wan-Bissaka did not shank a cross into the stands because he is ‘mentally weak’. That kind of talk is dangerous, especially when conflated so ridiculously with Love Island.
‘It may beggar belief that United’s younger players wouldn’t hang on his every word given his astonishing success and experience, in the way that he used to with older players like Roy Keane when he was a teenager at the club.
‘But many of them don’t.
‘They’re too rich, too arrogant, too stupid, too lacking in humility and self-awareness, to tap the brain of the GOAT of their sport, despite possessing trophy cabinets so empty even spiders don’t go inside for fear of getting lonely.’
This sounds very much like propaganda coming straight from Ronaldo’s mouth. If so, it reveals far more about him and his arrogance than the supposed arrogance of his teammates. And calling people ‘mentally weak’ and ‘stupid’ is rotten form whether it comes from Morgan or Ronaldo.
‘He said he was talking about young players generally, not just at United, but he could have been talking about so many young people in today’s snowflake society.’
Oh here we go. The dog whistle is out. The only surprise is that Morgan has not accused all these mentally-weak footballers of being ‘woke’.
‘Can the likes of Sancho, Lingard, Martial and McTominay really look in the mirror and say they have given it everything?
‘Can even Marcus Rashford, so impressive off the pitch with his relentless campaigning of the government over food for poor kids, be happy with his lacklustre contributions on the pitch that have seen him fall off Gareth Southgate’s England radar?’
We can all agree that Manchester United were poor last season – including all of those footballers – but this is a squad that literally finished second the season before. They did not suddenly become snowflakes. They did not suddenly become stupid. They did not suddenly become mentally weak.
‘Cristiano Ronaldo, who’s never happier than when he’s training to improve himself, finds this Love Islander attitude inexplicable in professional footballers.
‘That’s why he’s off.’
First, he’s not ‘off’ until somebody buys him. And second, in all likelihood he wants to be ‘off’ because he has to take a pay cut.