IT was an FA Cup weekend which showed just how far Manchester United have fallen.
Which showed how little their history means, how shockingly bad their recruitment has been — and how many clubs have overtaken them.
Legend Wayne Rooney was correct to warn the Red Devils[/caption]
Rooney was spot-on to say old boy Danny Welbeck would be an asset[/caption]
And it showed how correct Wayne Rooney was to criticise the naivety of United’s hierarchy for targeting the Premier League title within three years.
In a fascinating quarter-final line-up, there are four clubs — Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham and Crystal Palace — who have never won the Cup but who have realistic ambitions of doing so on May 17.
All four are infinitely smaller than United but sit above Ruben Amorim’s men in the Premier League table.
So when Rooney doubts United’s stated ambition of winning the title in their 150th anniversary year of 2028 — chief executive Omar Berrada’s so-called ‘Project 21’ — he is absolutely right.
Rooney called it ‘naive’. He might have added ‘arrogant’ and ‘delusional’.
United haven’t won it in 12 years and are now further away from doing so than at any point during that time.
Portuguese Amorim is a searingly honest press-conference operator but he was wrong to sneer at Rooney with his ‘that is why I’m manager of Manchester United at 40’ jibe.
That Rooney’s managerial career has stalled after four underwhelming jobs by the age of 39 does not mean his comments lack credibility.
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Are only successful football managers allowed to assess football managers?
Sir David Attenborough has never been a Rwandan mountain gorilla but he made a decent fist of talking about them.
Amorim claims being a pundit is easy — which doesn’t explain why so many ex-players are so bad at it.
Rooney, meanwhile, is far more articulate and insightful than he’s often given credit for.
He’s United’s record goalscorer and he understands that the club’s fame, its history, means little to current footballers — especially those from overseas.
“If I’m a player and United try to sign me, I’m thinking, ‘I’m not sure’,” said Rooney. “The top players want Champions League.”
United’s 13 titles under Sir Alex Ferguson are an irrelevance to the elite young players they want to recruit.
Those potential transfer targets will instead regard a shell of a football club, stuck in the bottom half of the table.
The idea of United targeting the title in 2028 is nonsense.
Before they can even think about challenging Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester City, they must get past that little lot of FA Cup quarter-finalists — Brighton, Bournemouth, Fulham and Palace.
Marcus Rashford is flourishing on loan for Aston Villa[/caption]
Joshua Zirkzee was gutted after a shootout miss as Fulham KO’d United[/caption]
All are well-run clubs benefiting from the ‘levelling up’ effect of Premier League TV revenue and Profit and Sustainability Rules.
United are not experiencing a one-season blip. They are suffering from a dozen years of rank boardroom mismanagement.
Would you bet on them finishing above Brighton, Bournemouth, Fulham or Palace next season?
When Fulham won at Old Trafford on Sunday, United cast-off Andreas Pereira shone, as did Sander Berge, the holding midfielder United tried and failed to sign from Burnley last summer.
Fulham manager Marco Silva was one of several bosses United sounded out before they offered a new contract to Erik ten Hag.
Silva is a gifted coach, who prioritised the Cup by resting several first-choice players for last Tuesday’s visit to Wolves, a match which Fulham won after their manager changed his favoured formation — showing an admirable flexibility which seems alien to Amorim.
Fulham beat United without playing well. Despite three key injuries of their own, they had a far stronger bench than United.
They are nine points clear of United because they are simply better.
United would love a forward as good as Bournemouth’s Justin Kluivert, Evanilson or Dango Ouattara, or a winger anywhere near the standard of Brighton’s Kaoru Mitoma
This is the Premier League’s new order. Smaller clubs have strong squads, well-scouted, recruited, assembled and coached. They don’t often need to sell their best players either.
They can work without the white noise that surrounds United, because of a history which only serves to drag the club further down.
Earlier on Sunday, United old boy Danny Welbeck scored an excellent winner for Brighton at Newcastle.
And at 34 Welbeck would still be a huge improvement on what Amorim has at his disposal — as Rooney pointed out.
On Friday night, Marcus Rashford was enjoying his freedom at Aston Villa — who haven’t won the Cup since 1957 but also have a decent chance of doing so.
And how United would love a forward as good as Bournemouth’s Justin Kluivert, Evanilson or Dango Ouattara, or a winger anywhere near the standard of Brighton’s Kaoru Mitoma.
Bournemouth and Brighton are diamond miners in the global transfer market, Fulham are more adept at recycling unwanted Premier League players and at Palace it’s a mix of the two approaches.
But all have succeeded while United have continually failed.
And these are the clubs United must surpass before they even think about challenging to be champions of England again.
Champions by 2028? Naive isn’t the half of it.
Mocking was sick
WHO says FA Cup romance is dead, when Saturday brought us a kung-fu kick at Crystal Palace v Millwall, a headbutt at Bournemouth v Wolves and a racism row at Preston v Burnley?
If the assault by Millwall keeper Liam Roberts on Palace striker Jean- Philippe Mateta wasn’t bad enough then the sick mocking songs of Lions fans were even more reprehensible.
Amazingly this challenge on Eagles attacker Jean-Philippe Mateta by Liam Roberts wasn’t the worst aspect of the FA Cup derby[/caption]
Palace supporters did retaliate sarcastically with a similar ‘let him die’ chant when a Millwall player was receiving treatment for a far less serious injury.
The FA say Millwall chants, which gloried in Mateta’s trip to hospital, cannot be punished because they do not breach their rulebook.
Well, either update your rulebook or use some common sense.
Millwall can have all the community initiatives they like but while they continue to be followed by such a high percentage of moronic lowlife, they will continue to be the pariahs of English football.
Mint’s missed moment
BRIGHTON’S Yankuba Minteh really should have celebrated his goal against former club Newcastle on Sunday.
It’s not just that Minteh, 20, was flogged in the summer without having ever played a minute of first-team football for the Magpies.
Yankuba Minteh had extra reasons to enjoy his goal at Newcastle[/caption]
It’s that the talented Gambian winger refused a move to Lyon after realising Newcastle merely regarded him as a saleable commodity to help them comply with Profit and Sustainability Rules.
Even though a £40million fee had been agreed, Minteh held out for the Premier League move he wanted and proved his worth with a goal which helped knock Toon out of the FA Cup.
He should have fully enjoyed his moment because he owed his opponents nothing.
Stat’s it, big Ange
IF Ange Postecoglou does not last as Tottenham boss, can we please beg all major broadcasters to offer him a blank cheque to head into punditry?
Because nobody cuts through football’s mountain of bulls**t quite like Big Ange.
Postecoglou’s disdain for VAR already earned the Aussie immense credit from this column — and now he has weighed in on the myth of ‘assist’ stats.
Ange Postecoglou is rightfully disdainful of assist statistics[/caption]
“The assist is the most useless statistic in world football,” said the Spurs chief.
“It could come off your backside, fall to somebody on the halfway line, he scores, and it’s an assist. So it doesn’t impress me.”
As usual, the big man is bang on.
Now blame the robo-flop
THE problem with VAR is the personnel, not the system, they lied.
Just wait until robot linesmen come in, with 30 high-speed cameras tracking 10,000 data points on every player — that will speed up checks, they promised.
Yeah, because that’s the thing you find with technology in your everyday life — it never fails, does it?
And then the robot linesmen arrived — and malfunctioned — and we waited for EIGHT minutes to find out whether a Bournemouth ‘goal’ against Wolves had been offside.
