And if one day or one night a demon should creep up behind you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you live it now, you must live it once more and countless times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life will have to come back to you…Won’t you throw yourself at land and cringe and curse the devil who spoke thus?
Yes I would like. I would probably do that. It’s getting easier to say this with certainty, to agree with Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return theory – which might previously have seemed a little sideways, lacking, say, the directness that makes the Premier League so special – after watching Sky Sports’ coverage of Sunday’s Manchester derby; and after watching Dave Jones turn to Roy Keane at the final whistle, with a sense even here of basic existence fatigue and ask, “Roy. How would you sum up this half? »
Like the legend paraded under his line of beard, Keane paused. Can I say he looked tired? That behind his eyes, the great anti-bluffer knew he too was in danger of sinking into muscle memory and learned response.
Roy didn’t pretend. He wasn’t manufacturing imaginary adrenaline. He said United players had basically given up, and not much more. And in the end, it felt like a moment to ask: are the great days of people saying Manchester United were bad already over? People saying Manchester United were bad was a glorious thing. We will always have those sunny memories, when people said Manchester United were bad, it was fresh and new. But it must be said that we expect a minimum of effort, cinematic rage and tweetable clips. Maybe we need to dig deep and look at the whole structure of people saying Manchester United are bad.
Because at this point we have surely reached a tipping point in this fascination with the daily decline of a badly run football club. Zoom out and United’s season is unremarkable. Fifth in the league, with some minor runs in the cup: Seems about right given the squad and coaching resources. Exactly what combination of Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ralf Rangnick, Fred, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and an elderly famous striker is supposed to guarantee success at elite level?
And yet the wheel of rage keeps turning, as the only really interesting thing about Manchester United right now is how unhappy people are with Manchester United. The most powerful element, the only true energy of the club, is this seemingly bottomless well of consternation.
It should be noted that this is not by chance. Good salespeople are infinitely adaptable. When life gives you a bad football team: make a bad football team. And so United’s lack of success became the product, a standalone media industry in its own right. After another mundane loss, we look forward to the real game around the lighted coffee table, the cut-aways, the memes, the legend-rage pornography.
Gary’s rant. Micah’s laugh. Scholesy’s frown of disdain. This is where the eyeballs are now, the clicks, the money. No more feasting on flesh, we are now gnawing on bones and sucking up marrow. What will be left in the end, you wonder?
There are two things to say about this. First of all, no useful purpose is served here. It’s not good for the Premier League, nor good for the way we consume this thing. There is a general principle that a grand failure is more interesting than an effective success. Stories of an untortured genius or flawless heroes rarely catch the imagination.
Therefore, Manchester City’s victory is harder to describe in an interesting way than Manchester United’s loss. Describing why and how City are good, how a team of seven technically sublime midfielders on a wonderfully grooved plane can still create overlap and space: it’s less eye-catching, less lyrical.
But this United obsession will also be eaten. The current mode of television analysis is to project a circle of light around a player who is not running and say things like: look at him. He doesn’t run. And from there to talk about character and essence, to suggest the explanation why Manchester United are no better than teams with better players and better management is something deep and rotten, something that, in the end, will reward our fascination.
In reality it is not an interesting failure. It is neither grand, nor upset, nor pure. This is easily explained. Compare Sunday’s rosters. Is it really surprising that City continue to win 4-1? Or that City’s method, which is designed to exhaust and demoralize, should ultimately do both to an inferior team? Run it through the computer. Simulate these known qualities. That’s what you would get.
Led carelessly from above, United have become a flabby entity on the pitch, a bizarre succession and disjointed recruitment, with no obvious winning method among the many layers of management that currently fill the void between coach and board. At the end of which Wan-Bissaka tries to defend against Phil Foden and João Cancelo, who are simply better players with a better plan. And Harry Maguire is once again accused of being somehow deliberately, consciously evil.
Maguire is of course only a symptom. Before moving to this incredibly demanding environment, he had played in the Premier League 69 times for Leicester and 32 times for Hull. Aged 29, he still hasn’t won a trophy. Maybe Maguire is just good but not great – a bit overexposed, but also scruffy now, scrambled and battered by the extraordinary levels of ambient doom, the constant dissection, the theatrical rage of punditry.
And that’s the other thing. This loss of scale is especially bad for Manchester United. Take a step back and it’s not terribly difficult to conclude that the spinning chorus of desperate legends may be part of the problem. It is a club which remains in the grip of its own past, but which is still capable of reselling this iconography; and still able to find a market for those old Easter Island heads, out there feasting on the bones of the present.
How much more difficult to move forward when every public screening is still broadcast from Fergie’s country; and while decline and failure, the reproaches of the glorious past, is still history.
Manchester United have been great for just over 20 years. They were bad for nine years. How long will it take? When do anguish and agony become the defining note? Why, you wonder, might these players feel their shoulders tense, the world closing in? Why do they look demoralized? We’ll come back after the break to hear more from the panel.
