Viktor Gyokeres to Man Utd ruled out as ‘doomed project’ criticised

Lots of talk about Viktor Gyokeres to Man Utd? But why would Europe’s hottest striker join a ‘doomed project’? Plus, Ten Hag, Vinicius and Sunderland…

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Gyokeres to Man Utd? Really?
Such rubbish stories coming out about Gyokeres and others following Amorim. Gyokeres in particular I would think would want to try himself at a better club, a different manager and not a doomed project. A couple of the lesser-known players may come along for Amorim’s own peace of mind.

If they do start following the migration, it’s just a repeat of Ten Hag, isn’t it? A manager who was focussed on a high press, servicing lots of chances for the striker. Amorim will only be different if he can legitimately adapt, or adapt the overpaid, overentitled players to his rigid style (at least in terms of sticking to his principles).

No chance.
Josh Cryer

READ: Gyokeres is the top scorer of 2024 by some margin

Can Amorim put lipstick on a pig?
Compelled to say ‘Shunt-LFC’ had a letter in recently which had me nodding in agreement several times as I read it.

Why indeed would Man Utd ever have hired a wet cardboard cut-out of a gaffer so prone to murky communication and so utterly lacking in any modicum of charisma or charm, both of which are key traits and the basic currency of top modern hires today (before even beginning to consider where one might arrange their magnets on a tactics board). I imagine his was like Sickboy’s job interview from Trainspotting, lots of spittle and gibberish in an ill-fitting blazer.

But, he got the job didn’t he. And over a prolonged and wretched tenure, Ten Hag spoke so blandly and so repetitively of “transition” and “patience” and “needing more time” that one would be forgiven thinking he was signposting towards himself as a man (or as a manager (…or as a man-manager)) rather than his club’s progress on the pitch.

Well Ruben Amorim, if it is to be him, will unlikely offer much more at the outset than familiar ETH refrains, buzzwords and sound bites such as “transition” and “patience” and “needing more time,” albeit freshly dressed in Portuguese-tinged vernacular. By the looks of it he already smiles better than Ten Hag, so hooray… it’s one-nil to the Ruben. But inevitably the questions will narrow, not only to how long Amorim actually needs, but also to what it will actually look like, can he actually do it, and what “it” actually is in the cyclical hell that is M16.

I imagine if Amorim lines up a back three of Slabhead, Dutch Slabhead and Dwarf Argentine, and his maneuvering in the windows reshape the club into Wolverhampton+ (much as Ten Hag tried to do up an Ajax redux), it might just all become sickeningly regurgitated content fairly quickly, a newly shaped tin with a bolder font on the label containing the same ineffective product.

The bar of standards has been set (and left) so abysmally low, you hope it can’t possibly decay any further. Amorim will surely equip with a charm offensive his predecessor couldn’t dream to muster, but just what shade of lipstick does he choose for the piggy I do wonder.
Eric, Los Angeles CA

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Notice me
Really enjoy Sporting insisting on Amorim honouring his notice period, such petty stuff.

They should then put him on gardening leave for real ‘who’s your daddy’ brassiness and he can head off for a rest and recharge on a beach somewhere in SE Asia – realign those chakras or whatever before the United job crushes his soul into a tiny cube of despair.
Tom, Leyton

Man Utd cocked it on Ten Hag
Just a quick reply to VED Sen regarding his defence of Ineos and their action of sacking Ten Hag.

You spent a while explaining the ethos and rationale behind the non sacking of Erik at the end of last season, but you omitted 2 facts which sort of kick your reasoning in the plums.

Firstly, Ineos spent all summer publicly courting other managers.

Secondly, they apparently gave Ten Hag a new contract after publicly courting other managers.

Doesn’t suggest to me that they were giving him a chance to prove himself, but that they had no clue as to what they were doing and convinced themselves (after being knocked back by every available manager) the FA Cup win over City was the dawn of a new era, confirmed by potting him after what was apparently a very unlucky result.

Also, if, after that 2 years of utter, utter dross from United you think it still could have been great, then you need to apply for a job working for Ineos because English football needs delusional people of your calibre working for towards United’s future.

Personally, I’m disappointed and every week was I was in the #Tenhagin camp.
Mike Swords, (LFC in case you hadn’t realised), Wigan

Blame the manager, not the players…
I’ve a real problem understanding what Badwolf’s point about United’s players downing tools is.

Do you think the fact that a manager can’t get his players to play for him doesn’t reflect a lot more on the manager than the players? If your team suddenly starts performing when you remove one thing then it’s not hard to see that the one thing was the problem.

Imagine setting yourself up for outrage should your team start winning again, bizarre.

Fair enough, you put your neck on the line by fawning over Ten Hag for the past couple of years but you’re a United fan surely. You’d rather see another year of failure under a terrible manager than success under another? Your last two letters are less about whether Ten Hag was wrong but rather that you were.

If you want to know why Ten Hag wasn’t getting the best out of his players you only have to look at the time he publicly announced Jadon Sancho’s mental health issues in a press conference. With one unapologetic, potentially illegal statement he told all of his players that he doesn’t have their back. That he has no qualms about airing their personal issues to deflect any blame for anything.

Would you work for a boss like that in your job? They should have sacked him immediately after that press conference, he was never going to regain the trust of anyone who played for the club. And if he said that to the press just imagine how he behaved behind closed doors.
SC, Belfast

Viniciusly overrated
If we take a moment to look past the Real Madrid bedwetting this week, admittedly funny though it was, there’s a proper question to be asked: Should Vinicius actually have won the Balon D’or?

For me the answer is a big fat no. He was great in the Champions League, no doubt. Probably player of the tournament, though goals in finals will do that for you. And he played well in the final.

But in La Liga he only managed 22 starts and a marginally better whoscored rating than Isco. Still a pretty bloody score at 7.41 but absolutely nowhere near Mr Jude Bellingham at 7.81. Bellingham was also excellent in the Big Cup and was also a big shout for player of the tournament.

So Vinicius wasn’t even the best player at Madrid last season, let alone the best player in the world. Arguably.

Where Vinicius really lost out is that he plays for Brazil and they’re rubbish, winning just one game at Copa America. And despite Real winning the Champions League (again), there’s no doubt in my mind that the reason they’re so competitive in the Big Cup is because La Liga is highly uncompetitive. As much as I hate City and they are still highly dominant, they do get given a tough time but more clubs on a weekly basis than Real Madrid. They are the better team and arguably have the better players.

Rodri is the best player for City (champions of England and the World last season) and the best player for Spain (champions of Europe and probably favourites for the next World Cup). He’s immense and had to win Balon d’Or this season.

Vinicius needs to stop sulking, come to United (in a swap deal for Rashford) and show he can do it on a Sunday afternoon at one of the London stadiums. Unlike our current squad. Then he’ll be a shoo-in, I’m sure.
Ash Metcalfe

READ: Real Madrid cry-arsing is enough to outweigh Uncle Carlo affection

…Real Madrid are a petty, entitled bunch of cnuts.

They seem to have forgotten that the Ballon D’or is essentially a popularity contest. Either that, or they are mad that they are not the most popular people around.

Such sore losers. Vini Jr actually had only an okay season in La Liga 2023/24. The only tournament he played well in was the Champions League. Rodri had 3 great tournaments (include one continental one).

There have been a few players during the years that may have – with reason – believed they were wrongly denied the award (Lewa, Haaland, VDV, Ribery, etc), but this is almost certainly the first time the losers have behaved this way.

They had no grace to even congratulate the winner. I mean, they have probably angered the voters enough to bias them (voters, that is) against Madrid players in the future.

And now we know why CR7 behaves the way he does. Petty, petulant, and entitled. Stopped voting once he stopped being nominated. It must be something in the Madrid water.

About the only thing missing was the Madrid team storming the BDO venue and demanding that the award be given to Vini or Jude.

And please grow up. Barça Kopa nominees schooling you is not exactly a good look.
Elif (I may understand overgrown babies that are sportsmen behaving this way, but the management? Since when was the BDO their birthright?) FC Barcelona

…Found your email on an article about the Ballon D’or – does this help provide some narrative behind Rodri winning?

I’ve been tracking what I call the total footballers for the last 5 years. I could do more, but this is a side project site that I’m kind of building myself.

When you filter by top leagues Rodri is top for the last 3 seasons with no sign of Vinicius Jr in a system that I score based on being a complete footballer. Goals, passing, tackles, assists etc.
Martin McGarry

What a difference a summer makes
Sunderland fan here. Since breaking out of League 1 in 2022 we had a surprising run to the playoffs in 2023 under Tony Mowbray, and then utterly regressed last season as we pointed our firearms directly down at our feet and appointed serial blagger Michael Beale. The board had the decency to admit their mistake and fire him fairly sharply, but we then limped over the league season finish line just ahead of the relegation spots.

An embarrassingly drawn-out head coach appointment finally settled on a guy called Regis Le Bris who pretty much no Sunderland fan had ever heard of, and we headed into the new season with a couple of solid-yet-unspectacular additions to our squad (Alan Browne from Preston, Simon Moore from Coventry).

The spine of the team remained more or less the same, including players like Jobe Bellingham who seemed criminally over-used last season and didn’t do anything to make us think that he’d be in any way near capable of hitting his brother’s heights.

Yet…we’re 12 games into the Championship season, clear at the top of the league, having won 9 and drawn 1. That’s on course for around 112 points if kept up, and sits comfortably 5 points ahead of where Peter Reid’s 1999 championship-winning 104-point team sat after the same amount of games. But the real eye-opener is how utterly transformed the squad seems.

Granted, we added a tidy-looking striker in Wilson Isidor late in the window (whose enthusiastic embracing of all things Sunderland has made him an instant fan favourite, never mind his goals), but to see the stark uplift in performance, organization, discipline and management is truly a thing of wonder. Jobe Bellingham looks, at 19, streets ahead of any other young player in the division, adding dynamism and craft to his powerful physique and making us all think he could *actually* be as good as big brother Jude. And alongside him in midfield we have a kid called Chris Rigg, who is 17 years old (not 18 till June!) and who will, mark my words, go on to play at the highest level. He’s that good. Add in other cracking young players like Dennis Cirkin (best left-back in the division by far), Romain Mundle, Anthony Patterson, Dan Neil, and more, and we’ve actually got the beginnings of a scarily good team.

Never have I seen a new head coach have such a transformative effect. The change from last season to this is night and day. Never, in all my forty years of following this club, have I seen a team look so good out of possession. Their management of games and tactical discipline is remarkable. For years Sunderland teams would hang on to leads by dropping deeper, inviting opponents on and bringing on extra defenders. Now they just breeze past opponents and see the game out like it’s a training session.

The only thing worrying me is that the young players we have are doing so well, that they are going to get picked off by bigger teams unless we get promoted. Certainly Rigg and Bellingham will be hot on the radar of the big clubs. We’re in danger of becoming victims of our own success, upping our ceiling so much that we need to achieve quicker than we thought. And if our head coach keeps working these miracles we’ll have to try and hang on to him too!

But just thought I’d write in and wax lyrical because, the six months of champagne football under Tony Mowbray aside as we unexpectedly made the playoffs, there hasn’t been an awful lot for Sunderland fans to be cheery about since the days of Roy Keane. I’m almost on the cusp of enjoying going to watch my team again.
James “the wheels are bound to come off at QPR on Saturday now I’ve written this” Rankin