Poor David not the only failure

It’s supposedly bad form to quote one’s own work.

But any Irish Examiner readers perusing my column here yesterday morning would have caught the terminal mood that prevailed after the Goodison Park defeat.

“Just make it all stop now, please: we’ve seen enough. Support is draining away from Poor David with every match. There is a gaping opportunity here for The Moment to arrive... This isn’t his team remember: but does he really deserve a last chance to create one that is?”

Anyone who can remember their childhood Latin lessons will recognise that as an ‘an’ clause: asking a question to which the expected answer is ‘no’.

After filing my column, I sounded out the lads I know who tend to act as barometers in these matters. They’d all been Moyes defenders for much of the season, but all I could hear from them now was the sound of towels being thrown in.

Red Issue staff were waving the white ’kerchief too: the fanzine’s website poll supplied further evidence, with only 6% prepared to back him to be here next season.

The Fat Lady had finally sung, and her song was “You’re getting sacked in the morning...”

I reported my findings to a friendly executive at United, with a cheery note attached — “Edward Woodward’s been paying social media monitoring firms thousands to monitor fan opinion about Moyes but you can have this for free” — and went to bed.

Yesterday morning: a breakfast chat with one of the leading United journalists in the Old Trafford hack pack. I tell him there’s been a sea change over the weekend and that it’s surely got to mean curtains for Moyes soon.

He agrees: he says he’s never seen United fans around town as sullenly uninterested as they were on Sunday night. We both know Edward Woodward’s been desperate to ensure he acts with the grain of fan opinion.

We talk about the prospects for Saturday’s game, and the likelihood of ugly scenes — and we don’t mean Phil Jones’s gurning. I tell him about a source who was out with a close Fergie relative 10 days earlier: he came home convinced Moyes “wouldn’t get to spend another penny of United’s money”.

Two hours later, a tip comes in from someone I know to be thick as thieves with a United director. “Moyes will be out. The next hours will see action.”

I call back my breakfast chat hack, and I can instantly tell from his voice that he already knows what I’m going to say. During those two intervening hours, a briefing has taken place by a “club source”, and several local hacks have assembled stories that will publish Moyes’s death warrant. But leaky Old Trafford has behaved in character, and the realisation that the story is already getting out to the fanzines’ websites forces hands. At 2.15pm, three papers simultaneously break the story on their websites — 30 minutes after the fanzines.

So Moyes’s departure ends up being as messy as Fergie’s was last May. Carefully laid plans and timetables are waylaid by events, and we end up with an afternoon of media mayhem, as United flap about between denying anything has happened, and refusing to deny that something will.

It’s quite fitting, really, that a regime marked by cock-ups, conspiracies and corporate clownery should end in such a manner — with a manager who has been knifed by the club, which then spends an embarrassing day in a tizzy about whether to twist it, pull it out, or give it another go.

Now we hear there will be a formal announcement from the club this morning.

If the ending has been similar to May 2013’s, let us hope the new beginning is different. The farce of having Fergie more or less imposing his pet candidate cannot, and will not, be repeated.

That much was also made clear by my Fergie source of 10 days ago, when he spoke somewhat bitterly of Woodward keeping Sir Alex “at some distance” nowadays.

I understand that Woodward is a big fan of Dortmund’s Jurgen Klopp, but I have also learned that United suits were already having serious discussions about the merits of Atletico’s Diego Simeone back in February.

A few romantics will carry a torch for the Class of ’92 but there’s also a suspicion they missed their chance back in March, when the notion of a coup was first mooted in dark circles.

Red Issue’s poll last night was unequivocal: 82% for Klopp, 9% Simeone, 4% each for Ryan Giggs and Louis van Gaal.

Thus, Woodward has the chance to go with the grain of fan opinion, if he can prise his own favourite Klopp out of Germany.

But can we trust a man who failed to prise any of Moyes’s targets from their clubs during two transfer windows to do any better when fishing for a manager?

David Moyes has failed this season, no doubt. But Edward Woodward has matched him almost every step of the way. One man will be left in ruins, whilst the other will still prosper.

“Football, eh? Bloody hell”, as someone once said.