The Warm-Up: Mourinho misery, fake news and Pyramids FC
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Updated 30/07/2018 at 07:32 GMT
Adam Hurrey no longer wants to go for a pint with Jose Mourinho, especially in July...
Manager Jose Mourinho of Manchester United paces the sideline during the International Champions Cup 2018 match against the AC Milan at StubHub Center on July 25, 2018 in Carson, California. Manchester United defeated AC Milan 9-8 on penalties after play
Image credit: Getty Images
MONDAY’S BIG STORIES
Mourinho, moaning, Matic and Martial
Pre-season doesn’t matter.
Except, perhaps, when you lose 4-1 to your sworn enemies, including a bicycle kick from one of their shrewder summer acquisitions, sending some of your more, shall we say, web-based fans into something of a tailspin.
Plenty of sensible people tell us we shouldn’t read anything into pre-season results, but there is an overriding covet-thy-neighbour culture enveloping football these days, so when a cut-price Xherdan Shaqiri rubbed Liverpool’s salt in Manchester United’s wounds in Ann Arbor late on Saturday night, it stung.
Pre-season doesn’t matter.
Except, perhaps, if your manager spends every spare minute of it refining his bizarre, miserable caricature by reiterating his perceived lack of squad options with just two weeks to go until the Premier League season kicks off. Jose Mourinho’s post-match press conference was his trademark special blend, ingredients as follows:
1 tbsp of detail about his summer transfer wishlist, on which the United board are yet to fully deliver.
10 fl oz of melodramatic praise for his “brave boys” for putting themselves on the line “because they don’t want to let all the kids play by themselves.”
Half a cup of thinly-veiled questioning of certain players’ fortitude
A pinch of humour, in this case directed towards the referees, who “were called by the baseball federation and thought it was baseball but found out it was soccer.”
Pre-season doesn’t matter.
Except, perhaps, when your attempts to make a dent in your city rival’s Premier League dominance are undermined by both the enforced absence of one your most important players and a public dressing-down of another who remains at home with his new baby instead of sweating it out in a Michigan megabowl stadium for the sponsors.
Nemanja Matic will miss the start of the season, having returned from the World Cup with an abdominal problem that has required surgery before he could play a minute of pre-season football. Meanwhile, Anthony Martial – “he should be here and he is not here” – remains on paternity leave and is unlikely to return to the US tour for the match against Real Madrid.
Pre-season doesn’t matter.
Actually, Mourinho really made a case for this. “The atmosphere in the stadium was good but if I was them I wouldn’t come. I wouldn’t spend my money to see these teams.”
And when a man is tired of hyping pre-season, second-gear glamour friendlies, he is surely tired of life.
Qatar 2022 accused of ‘fake news’ campaign
Anyone else starting to feel a bit sorry for the organisers of Qatar 2022? No, probably not. The latest allegations of World Cup corruption have been levelled, and they’re slightly bizarre in places.
In summary, an anonymous whistleblower (so many of those these days, it seems) has told the Sunday Times that a smear campaign was orchestrated against the rival bids from the USA and Australia, in indirect violation of FIFA’s bidding rule prohibiting “any written or oral statements of any kind, whether adverse or otherwise, about the bids or candidatures of any other member association.”
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The 2022 World Cup finals in Qatar are in doubt
Image credit: Panoramic
Anyway, the allegations included:
• Paying a professor $9,000 (almost £7,000) to write a report on the devastating economic cost of a US World Cup
• “Recruiting journalists, bloggers and high-profile figures in each market to raise questions and promote negative aspects of their respective bids in the media.”
• American PE teachers were recruited to lobby congress to oppose a US World Cup because the money would be better spent on high school sports
Finally, and this one sounds like it would definitely have swung it:
• “A group of pro-rugby students in Melbourne, Australia…will start appearing at rugby matches with signs ‘Hands off our rugby! No to World Cup!’ in June”
Have the Qatar 2022 committee held their hands up and admitted “you got me”? No, they’ve denied all wrongdoing. But I’d like to hear more about these “pro-rugby students”. Did they have placards? Did they organise anti-World Cup drinking games?
HEROES AND ZEROS
Hero: Wayne Rooney
The legacy, memory and athleticism of Wayne Rooney might be disappearing over the footballing horizon, but he remains a curiously sympathetic figure. Having wandered off to MLS with only a little fanfare, and that very deliberate, softly-spoken approach to the often pointed questions that came with that move, Rooney has now opened his account for DC United.
That is indeed Rooney’s former Old Trafford team-mate Tim Howard, 39, between whose geriatric-looking legs the ball was squeezed to get England’s international record goalscorer off the mark in his new shirt. The 32-year-old also boasted of a “broken nose and five stitches” earned in an injury-time clash of heads. A late-career stroll this is not.
Zeros: Pyramids FC
There are cynical rebrands. And then there is the rebrand of Egyptian Premier League club Al Assiouty to become…Pyramids FC.
Perhaps its the badge – 50% NFL franchise, 50% Wetherspoons guest ale of the week – but the whole thing seems a bit…superficial.
HAT TIP
Nestled between the Rock and an airport runway, a football team are making history in Gibraltar. This time it is not the national side conceding an exorbitant number of goals (124 at the last count in four and a half years) or Lincoln Red Imps beating Celtic in the Champions League. It did not even happen on the artificial pitch of the iconic national ground, Victoria Stadium. Instead, Premier Division Gibraltar United have crept into the spotlight by becoming the world’s first football team to introduce cryptocurrency.
Here’s Molly McElwee’s thoroughly #ModernFootball piece for the Guardian about football’s first dip of its toes into the cryptocurrency waters. How many bitcoins for a 20-goal-a-season Championship striker these days, eh?
RETRO CORNER
Today we wish a very happy birthday to Jurgen Klinsmann, that galloping, volleying hero of the 1980s and 1990s. Here, in something approaching glorious HD, are his top 5 goals in the Bundesliga. It’s a very worthwhile two minutes of your time.
COMING UP
The revelation that the 18-team International Champions Cup has an actual league table means that today’s fixture can be introduced as “basement boys Paris Saint-Germain take on mid-table Atletico Madrid as both sides look to kick-start their ICC campaigns with a win at the National Stadium in Singapore”. Kick-off is at lunchtime, which will make a change from repeats of Judge Rinder, won’t it?
Tomorrow’s edition will be brought to you by Nick Miller, who has fond memories of the more innocent days of the Makita Trophy
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