Recent content by Shaun Lawson

Oh, I signed up a bit over a year ago now. Made a few posts around that time. But I'm always just passing through a bit, cos well, check which club I support! I'll always take an interest in United because, well, they're Manchester United! I take an interest in all the major clubs, basically.

How do United get out of this mess? Find new, incredibly rich, competent owners: with a plan and strategy which doesn't involve ripping off the club left, right and centre. It's now a decade since Summer 2009, when Ronaldo left. Saha had exited a year earlier. Almost imperceptibly, his...

Yes. As a neutral, I'd turn on the telly or radio, United would be on most weeks, the game would kick off and I'd hear that nick nack paddy whack chant immediately. Which I'd instinctively associate with the team getting right at the oppo from the first whistle. That was a legacy of Ferguson's...

Ha - "poor" is certainly not a definition I'd use for his third season there in 06/7. They won both domestic Cups, lost on pens in the CL semis, and spent large chunks of the second half of the season looking like, with United, one of far and away the two best sides in Europe. But there were...

Our owners are holding us back because they have no money. They're the financially poorest owners in the Championship now. And they refuse to sell to any foreigner under any circumstances. Which leaves me feeling rather less than ecstatic. Allowing for my personal bias, my list would be...

Bingo. And why did they come back that day? Because at 2-0 down, they had to go for it. Their manager's instructions had put them two down in the first place. There's a major health warning here, because I have no idea if Ashton's story is true or not. It is The Sun, after all. But in any case...

I think the OP's spot on. I'm a complete neutral with no skin in this game - but United over the last decade? This is how I see it: - United had the best squad I've ever seen in English football between 2007 and 2009. But sometime near the end of 08/9, they stopped playing with the fluency I'd...

This is a flawed analysis - albeit, I agree with it in part. Chelsea 2012 were simultaneously the jammiest winners of a major event I've maybe ever seen - but also, the most unbelievably determined. The quality they had is something I'm tempted to call 'stickability': that German or Italian...

That book is marvellous! I'd had my eyes opened to the reality of Mourinho a year or so before it was published (around the time of the CL semi v Bayern rightly cited by others on this thread), but drew on it extensively in something I wrote here, just after he left Chelsea the second time...

I fully agree with this. Many tournament-winning teams do ride their luck to an extent - all sorts of little details can play their part in the eventual outcome. But Greece played rope-a-dope with, on paper, far superior sides, every single one of which grossly underestimated them. In the semis...

The answer to the OP is because his mentality and tactics don't work. That's not because football has "passed him by". It's because he himself has changed, dramatically. The Mourinho who led Porto, Chelsea (first time round) and Inter to such success was an absolute phenomenon. I have never...