By: Guest Wrtiter,
Are Manchester United jinxed with a r
ecurring catalogue of injuries? Manchester United last season suffered the worst injury list, with 39 serious injuries resulting in the players involved being unavailable for selection for a combined total of 1681 days!
Goalkeepers and Defenders
So, another review is here, the good people at PR Genie have decided that more time and
devotion shall be spent on my couch as I trawl through some obvious, some surprising,and some downright ridiculous candidates for the best Manchester United XI. In stark comparison to the otherwise impressive Rooney Goal Machine, the opening titles and graphics have a slight air of class about them, less Europa League, more Champions League perhaps. Loud classical music blares triumphantly with the overblown grandiosity of a late ‘90s SKY Sports advert. The basic format is from a competition invented by the club’s website in 2011 where fans vote on the best players for each position, based on what I’m guessing is a rigid 4-4-2 formation.
Welcome to the ninth episode of the Red Dead Podcast, the super sexy Manchester United podcast for Truly Reds, brought to you as always by Tom “Darren Fletcher” Addison and Liam “Wrestlemania” Brown.
This week we try to cover United’s last three matches (and decide to skip one), lay into the retarded fans that ruined the Leeds game, get all Sigmund Freud and try to understand the “Cognitive Biases” that make football fans such plebs, and infiltrate fortress RAWK and discuss whether scousers, as some clame, invented the 4-2-3-1 formation.
In what will be a new weekly feature, we also take a trip down memory lane and revisit the youth team legend that was Philip Mulryne, and we announce our new mascot/man-crush for the coming season.
Comments, feedback and questions are greatly appreciated, you can contact us on reddeadpodcast@hotmail.co.uk
Remember, you can also follow us, and Truly Reds, on Twitter: @TrulyReds @TomRDPodcast and @LiamRDPodcast
Join us again soon, where we’ll be dissecting United’s performance against Stoke and generally ranting like old men about all sorts of issues that are beyond our intellectual capacity.
And don’t forget, the 7th Annual Podcast Award nominations are now open! So go on, give us a nomination, you know you want to. Liam will strip for your next birthday if you do.
The best goalscorer Manchester United legend Denis Law has ever seen is Jimmy Greaves but when he looks around the Premier League the striker he can relate to best is Wayne Rooney. Law does not watch many games these days but he did travel to Wembley in May to see the Champions League Final. Like everyone else, he was impressed with Barcelona and Lionel Messi but Rooney’s equaliser was like a ray of hope. “Rooney will probably break all goal scoring records if he keeps away from injury” Law says ”he needs to be sharp and fit. That’s the secret. You can’t teach a person to score goals. There are loads of players who get into a position and you know they are not going to score. Then there are others like Michael Owen, Messi and Ronaldo who will score. Rooney’s in that category.”
Former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez may be on the football scrapheap at the moment but is certainly not forgotten by Manchester United icon Sir Alex Ferguson who had no hesitation in continuing his feud with the Spaniard – while defending Jose Mourinho’s confrontational managerial style. Ferguson saw a picture of Benitez during an interview in an Italian newspaper office and said “He is jobless and he is not my friend.” On the other hand Sir Alex says he is a close pal of Mourinho, tipped to follow him at Old Trafford but whose success has been blighted by disciplinary problems with the football authorities.
The end came for me on New Year’s Day, 2011 – and it came on a toilet at The Hawthorns. It wasn’t the way I’d have chosen to finish, but I knew for certain that this was my last game. After 18 years at Manchester United, after 602 first-team appearances, I was in the middle of playing for my team for the last time. And I couldn’t wait for it to be over. In the dressing room, the manager was barking instructions about how we were going to improve on a dire first half performance against West Brom.
