Saudis, sponsors and stats leave sour taste

BEFORE I start: tell me, is it my turn to manage Newcastle United yet? No? Ah well, back to the day job, then.

I love sneeringly perusing those statistics boxes that have become de rigueur in all the football press these days, with their nerdy tabulation of every misplaced pass and self-important player rankings.

They show a touchingly naive — and utterly mistaken — faith in the ability of statistics to summarise judgmentally a game that can, in fact, only be understood instinctively, even emotionally.

Every paper usually ends up with different totals for shots on or off and so forth, which helps illustrate my point: one man’s blocked shot is another’s miscued cross.

I imagine the press box tabulators as chair-sheltered trolls, nestling under the over-ample asses of the football writers, fearing both calculator failure and lager-fuelled gas from above.

Anyhow we’ll be coming back to figures and football, in the larger moral sense, shortly.

But meanwhile, all the Tab Trolls agreed: United missed a shed load of chances on Saturday, more or less as many as against Newcastle the week before, to an almost comic degree.

I particularly enjoyed the wildly incompetent efforts by Carrick and Giggs, although of course I wouldn’t have been laughing had Fletcher’s mistake shortly after coming on produced the threatened Reading equaliser.

Ah, poor Darren — he’d been hinting all week that pastures new may be calling (which as I suggested would be best for him here a few weeks ago) and his rare subsequent run-out proved, once again, that the loss of the last scrap of Old Trafford tartan would not be grievous.

Thank goodness, once again, for Roo and Ron (a Troll whispers: “points per game with: 2.71 — without 1.50”) and kudos to Tevez for the exquisite first goal assist. But fun though these turkey shoots have been, we will need to sharpen up when we get back into Europe.

Conversion ratios of 1 in 9 do not win European Cups. Neither, one might argue, do pointless midweek 6,000 mile round-trips.

Yes, United are busy whoring themselves out as some sort of harem to the Saudi overlords this week, with Fergie claiming that a 5.45am arrival and a 5.30am departure to hit flight schedules does not constitute an imperfect preparation for Spurs on Sunday.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Incidentally, I note the crowd on Monday night was all-male, as women are banned from games in that enlightened state. United playing in front of segregated crowds? What is this, the Sun City era? Or is institutional discrimination that would be illegal in Britain fine as long as it’s sexist rather than racist?

I suppose that is a minor point in comparison to the more obvious one: what are United doing, allowing themselves to be hired like some sad 80s pop group at a plutocrat’s birthday party? What next, a spring break in Burma? Christmas in North Korea? Apparently the £1m bounty is the answer to all these concerns; proof, once again, that figures and football mix badly.

But it seems everything has its price these days: you can always put a figure on any element of United’s soul.

You may think for example, that adverts and death don’t go together under any circumstances. Yet there is the AIG logo, grotesquely disfiguring the massive tribute banner the club have put up at OT to the Busby Babes, thus turning something that could have been impressive into a total own goal. The club also managed to cock up the wording of the lyrics on it, and also appended a horrific cheesy strap-line at the bottom of it that is redolent of a naff TV ad pay-off.

So much for our hopes, raised when the cool no-ad special ‘58 kit plan was approved before Christmas, that United were going to do all this with some dignity and class.

Instead, it seems they just couldn’t wait to get stuck into what really turns Glazer United on: sucking up to its sponsors.

Indeed, the whole Munich anniversary seems to be tasting sour this week, with Man City’s increasingly desperate fan leaders giving up the ghost on their effort to encourage some civilised behaviour from their number, and with the FA rightly abandoning their own Wembley tribute plans. Many of us said back in August that we should keep all this very quiet, dignified and totally in-house. Did anyone listen?

As the Tab Trolls would tell us, there’s always a 0% chance of that...

* Richard Kurt, whose Red Army Years is only available via [e-mail]