Spotlight

Manchester United are not dead. That would be easier. Dead things stop moving. They stop disappointing you. Eventually you bury them, say a few nice words, drink too much afterward and get on with your […]

Bruno Fernandes broke my heart this week. That sounds ridiculous until you remember football is mostly grown men attaching childhood feelings to strangers in red shirts. Bruno was one of mine. For years, through all […]

There are certain things players at Manchester United are not supposed to say out loud. They can talk about standards. They can talk about togetherness. They can promise a reaction. They can tell MUTV that […]

There is something grotesque about what happened at Anfield. Manchester City, freshly found guilty by an independent commission of 114 breaches of Premier League financial rules, walked onto the pitch, played a football match, won […]

We know how this ends because we have watched it for ten years. The performances go flat. The players stop running. The manager starts drowning. Leaks appear. Supporters lose patience. The board briefs that standards […]

For more than a decade, we were told to admire the machine. The trophies. The managers. The £1 billion squad. The gleaming training complex. The commercial juggernaut somehow generating revenues fit for Real Madrid while […]

There are bad performances, and then there are performances that tell you something rotten is living underneath the surface. Fulham was the latter. Manchester United did not just play poorly. They looked indifferent. Slow to […]

This one should hit Carrick for the result, but turn the knife toward the people who keep handing United managers incomplete squads and acting surprised when they break. There is something almost impressive about losing […]

There are nights when football is about tactics, formations, expected goals and whether the left back tucked five yards too far inside. Thursday is not one of those nights. Thursday is about hearing that music […]

There comes a point when you have to stop blaming the manager. Michael Carrick can pick the wrong midfield. He can make a bad substitution. He can lose at Hull and deserve every rotten tomato […]