Rooney identifies 29-year-old ‘kid’ at Manchester United
What should Manchester United do? Build around the 29-year-old leaving in the summer…
Sensations
It sums up the Manchester United obsession of the media that on the day that Manchester City and Liverpool play in the Champions League quarter-finals and the day after Arsenal lost momentum in their top-four battle with an abject performance at Crystal Palace, The Sun are screaming ‘MAN UTD SENSATION’ on their back page.
And this ‘MAN UTD SENSATION’ is that Wayne Rooney appeared on Sky Sports and said that Cristiano Ronaldo’s return to Manchester United has BACKFIRED (their capitals, and indeed their word). Sensation? it would have been closer to a ‘sensation’ (a widespread reaction of interest and excitement) if he had said that actually, Ronaldo had turned out to be a wonderful signing and hadn’t everything gone swimmingly well.
When one of your sub-headlines is ‘Pogba should go…it’s time to blood the kids’ then you know this ‘sensation’ has no substance at all because Pogba is already going in the summer. That horse has bolted. Rooney has just said what thousands of Manchester United fans would say if inexplicably given some broadcast time and asked about the problems at the club.
And as for ‘the kids’. Let’s take a look at those ‘kids’ put forward by Rooney as the future of the club: Jadon Sancho (22), Marcus Rashford (24), Scott McTominay (25) and Jesse Lingard (29, older than Pogba and out of contract at the end of the season).
The only ‘sensation’ here is that Rooney might be the oldest 36-year-old in town.
Kane and able
On the inside pages of The Sun, Mark Irwin is being miserable about Manchester United and for once his misery is warranted because Manchester United really are in a mess.
We largely agree with him on United and their position offering little but ludicrous wages but we have to question his stance on Harry Kane:
‘Kane and Haaland could have their pick of just about any club in the world this summer.
‘And that pick sure ain’t going to be United.’
Kane could not have his pick of just about any club in the world last summer so he sure as hell ain’t going to have that luxury at 29. Or are The Sun still pretending this was true?
This is the trend
Wayne Rooney is trending so step forward the Trends Writers tasked with eking out any content with his name in the headline, which is how you end up here on football.london:
‘Wayne Rooney tells Thomas Tuchel simple trick to improve Chelsea squad for free next season’
So let’s hear what Rooney had ‘told’ Tuchel via the medium of Sky Sports:
“I thought they were excellent, especially with the intensity that they played with. I thought Gallagher and his intensity rubbed off on the other players and I thought the three-nil was deserved.”
That’s told him.
I was only joking, my dear
Back to The Sun and what a bizarre lack of humour on display here from Martin Blackburn:
‘PEP GUARDIOLA sent a shiver down the spines of Manchester City supporters as he promised to “overthink” his gameplan tonight.’
He was f***ing joking, guys.
Give me oil in my lamp…
Stan Collymore once described Frank Lampard as ‘the brightest English coach to emerge for a generation’ so it’s no surprise that he sees him as an asset to Everton even in their darkest hours but this made us smile in the Daily Mirror:
‘They have had a massive cash injection in recent years, have an incredible new stadium coming and a Premier League legend as their manager in Frank Lampard, someone who knows the lay of the land as well as anybody.’
What does that even mean? How can a man utterly unaccustomed to a relegation battle ‘know the lay of the land as well as anybody’, especially as he has demonstrated with literally six points from eight Premier League games that this particular land is beyond him?
He then admits that it would ‘be hard to see him getting a big job again unless, of course, he were to bring them straight back up and build from there’.
You think he gets to stay after this sh*t-show?
April fools
Gabriel was poor on Monday night for Arsenal so what better time than now for a re-hash job on a four-day-old piece of gossip from an Italian website? So step forward Mark White of FourFourTwo, who has a penchant for such nonsense.
This is the entirety of the report from TuttoMercatoWeb from April 1, after a little spin through Google Translate:
‘Gleison Bremer’s season at Turin did not leave any of the great teams in the world indifferent, in fact, there are many who have already shown interest in him. Tottenham, Manchester United, Arsenal, Juventus and Bayern Munich were the first to appear willing to reach a deal for the Brazilian defender in the upcoming summer transfer window, but no doubt many more are to come. Turin, moreover, would not intend to ask for impossible runs, there is talk of 30 million euros.’
Four days and an Arsenal defeat later and this has become ‘Arsenal report: Mikel Arteta identifies shock Gabriel replacement’.
So the headline tells us very clearly that a replacement for Gabriel has been identified, but even as early as the opening line, there has been considerable dilution:
‘Arsenal are preparing a move for a £25m defender – which in turn could signal an end to Gabriel’s Gunners career.’
‘Which in turn could’, you say?
‘Now, TuttoJuve say that Arteta has identified a new defender to bring a little more resilience to his backline – and Gabriel could be the man who drops out.’
There’s that word again.
‘Bremer of Torino has been targeted, with Arsenal leading the host of European clubs interested in his signature. A composed, positionally supreme centre-back with superb aerial ability, it’s easy to assume that the 25-year-old is the leader profile that Arteta would favour next to Ben White, a £50m acquisition from Brighton last summer – despite the fact that the Basque boss prefers a left-footer on that side of the defence. Bremer is right-footed.’
It’s ‘easy to assume’ if you want to crowbar Gabriel into a headline, yes. It’s not so easy to believe there is any substance at all to this opportunistic guff.
