The mere prospect of it is enough to titillate and to tantalise scholars of English literature everywhere but if Ryan Giggs were to turn his poetic talents towards the plunging fortunes of his alma mater, what a cavalcade of metaphors and similes he might unleash. More of them than all Giggs’s Premier League appearances, which is a lot.
A regret is there would be little reason for him to revisit his signature image of a totem pole as a symbol of excitement. ‘Flaccid’ is not part of the Giggs lexicon but the truth is there has been very little to stir the blood at Old Trafford these past few years, save for us to marvel at quite how bad Manchester United have become and quite how incompetently they’ve been ruled.
Giggs’s trial at Manchester Crown Court — he denies causing actual bodily harm to an ex-girlfriend and assaulting her sister by elbowing her in the jaw as well as using controlling and coercive behaviour towards his former partner — has mirrored the mood of dark and unintentional mirth surrounding United at the start of this season.
Casemiro is set to join Manchester United from Real Madrid in a £30million deal
Erik ten Hag has taken over a ship at United that has been sinking for nearly a decade
Not even Friday’s signing of Casemiro, one of the best midfield players in the world, can shift the reality that, nine years on from their last Premier League title win, United have become a laughing stock. The club are a congealing, decaying, pustulating, tired, complacent, arrogant, directionless, self-regarding, incompetent mess.
Casemiro, set to join for £60million from Real Madrid at the age of 30, is a fine player who should improve the side but the club have been mismanaged for so long that there is a fear he will simply disappear into the black hole of mediocrity that has ruined so many reputations in the era since Sir Alex Ferguson retired nearly a decade ago.
It is also evident that Casemiro has not left Real Madrid, the club where he won the Champions League for the fifth time last summer, for a side languishing at the bottom of the Premier League, in the search for career advancement.
The hard reality is that, in 2022, there is only one reason to swap Real Madrid for Manchester United and it is not the promise of winning major trophies. United are taking the top teams’ cast-offs when they are past their peak.
Once an Old Trafford icon, forward Cristiano Ronaldo is now desperate to leave the club
Brazilian Casemiro will link up with former Madrid team-mate Raphael Varane (left) at United
Casemiro is joining a club who are the whipping boys of English football, used as a punchline and a tease by Elon Musk and still reeling from conceding four goals in the first half to Brentford in west London last week.
No wonder prospective buyers such as billionaire industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe are circling. The best time to buy is when a club hit bottom and United must be close to that now.
Which brings us, of course, to the Glazers. The United owners have blighted the club since they bought it and loaded it with debt in 2005 and they will be the object of another wave of protests from fans ahead of tomorrow night’s clash with Liverpool at Old Trafford.
It is to be hoped the protests are peaceful but I do not blame the United fans one jot for their demonstrations of dissatisfaction and despair, nor do I buy into the idea that displays of ineptitude like the one at the Gtech Community Stadium last Saturday should be placed at the door of the players rather than the owners. Of course the players bear some responsibility but all of this flailing and writhing is on the Glazers.
The Brazilian midfielder won five Champions Leagues during his time in Spain with Madrid
The Glazer family have been pushed by fans to leave United for several years now
Everything stems from them. It has to. A fish rots from the head down. United are rotting from the Glazers down and the stench is becoming overpowering. People can say the Glazers weren’t on the pitch at Brentford but they were. It was impossible not to see them everywhere.
They might not have kicked a ball but they created the conditions for the embarrassing shambles that unfolded. The bankruptcy of their cursed reign was written all over that wretched performance.
It is one thing to talk about all the money they have taken out of the club and the interest payments they have saddled it with and their willingness to use United as a vehicle for their doomed attempts to help found a European Super League that would have destroyed the Champions League and damaged the fabric of English football beyond repair.
United have lost their first two games of the Premier league season and are bottom of the table
But the damning of the Glazers is as much to do with their sheer incompetence as their financial model. They delegated the running of the club to money men like Ed Woodward, who were well-meaning but spectacularly out of their depths and the result has been a recruitment policy — of players and managers — that has been haphazard and shambolic.
The stadium is outdated, the training facilities have fallen behind other clubs. On the pitch, United are a collection of individuals, not a team.
They don’t work hard enough to be a team. They don’t even do the basics right. They do not even have the humility to work as hard as Manchester City or Liverpool.
Their sense of entitlement is all-pervasive. That is because the club run on reputation. Men such as Woodward were blinded by celebrity and blinked in its glare, which goes some of the way to explaining the hirings of Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho.
Avram and Joel Glazer have tried to rebuild their relationship with the fanbase several times
More protests are expected when United face Liverpool at Old Trafford on Monday evening
Too often, the club’s dealings in transfer windows have resembled amateur night. The signing of Casemiro notwithstanding, the evidence of this window shows that, even though Woodward has gone, little has changed.
And if you want a symbol of the inadequacies of United’s recruitment policy, an example of its shallowness and the way it is predicated on all the wrong criteria, look no further than the second coming of Cristiano Ronaldo and the way the club’s fawning to his stardom stopped all signs of progress dead in its tracks.
Ronaldo scores goals but, in the autumn of his career, he also ruins teams. And, in thrall to his commercial power, the pygmies in charge at United have allowed him to become bigger than the club.
Erik ten Hag’s miserable start is not just down to the looming presence of Ronaldo but he has reached an age where the size of his personality has outstripped the contribution he can make.
Any team with real ambitions of becoming a power in the game would not have signed him last season. Any team serious about rebuilding would have ushered him out of the door in the summer.
United haven’t won the Premier League since legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson retired
Ferguson is still involved at United and won their last title back in 2013 before retiring
Instead, United stumble on in the gathering gloom. Ten Hag is already wearing the look of a man who is wondering what the hell he has got himself into and the Glazers are fiddling around the edges, talking to US private equity fund Apollo Global Management about them buying a minority stake in the club. The supporters see that development and recoil at the idea of more of the same.
United may beat Liverpool tomorrow but it will not alter the theme of what is happening at the club or undermine the reasons for the protests: Manchester United are a great footballing institution being run into the ground by a toxic blend of cynicism, greed and rank incompetence.
‘Can’t help thinking, pulling you was my greatest ever coo,’ Giggs enthused in his poem to his former love before things turned bad, but the relationship between United and the Glazers has always been a loveless union.
The suggestion is that some of the family are beginning to regret their conquest of United. Forget totem poles or whatever symbol you want to use for spikes of excitement, because United are flatlining.
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