Football Daily | Manchester United’s search for something that smells like team spirit

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While their noisy neighbours continued their progress through Big Cup’s group stage with a routine slap-down of Young Boys that earned them a place in the knockout stages with two games to spare, the players of Manchester United were cloistered in a Copenhagen hotel before their game against the Danish champions. While Manchester City, the reigning champions, are motoring through Group G as smoothly as a Red Bull race car negotiating a particularly tricky hairpin, United’s progress has looked more like that of a clown car clunking and spluttering its way around the Big Top. They lost their opening game against Bayern Munich by the odd goal of seven and their second by the odd goal of five against Galatasaray before arresting their poor by scraping past Copenhagen at Old Trafford thanks to some late goalkeeping heroics from André Onana.

Shall we just hand Big Cup to Manchester City and save the planet by preventing all that carbon footprint?” – Krishna Moorthy.

‘If we go down to five men we will have a go.’ I don’t want to diminish Big Ange’s enthusiasm (yesterday’s Football Daily) but the game would have been abandoned if there were fewer than seven Spurs players still on the pitch. Maybe it is not too late for him to read the FA rules” – Nigel Sanders (and 1,056 others).

May I be the first to congratulate John Aldridge on his good manners in removing his trainers before putting his feet up on that beautiful table (yesterday‘s Memory Lane, full email edition). That must be very occasional behaviour among pro footballers” – John Lawton.

Re: Andrew Kluth (yesterday’s Football Daily letters) – I don’t see that there is any contradiction in standing in front of a back-garden swimming pool. From a photographic perspective, surely ‘in front of’ simply means nearer the camera. ‘Back-garden’ defines a location relative to the house. It’s not as if it were a quantum physics pantomime (given the rapidly approaching time of year) in which the audience could call: ‘He’s behind you! And in front of you!’ at the same time” – Ken Muir.

A collector’s piece of a substitution by Young Boys in their match at the Etihad last night, Ulisses Garcia being replaced by Noah Persson, a rare example of an Iliad hero losing out to an Old Testament floating zookeeper” – John Addison. Continue reading...

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