MANCHEATERS URINATED HAS BECOME THAT WHICH THEY DETESTED EVEN WORST.. By November of 2010, after two years in which Alex Ferguson had sent a fair few barbs towards Manchester City about their spending, there seemed to be a shift in the former United managers attitude. He was no longer speaking dismissively about kamikaze expenditure or how the blue halfs biggest triumph was just getting players to come for the massive cash. He realised circumstances had changed. We know the kind of money theyre spending, Ferguson said. Theyve bought another five or six players in the summer and theyll keep doing that until they win something. You know thats going to be the way it is and you have to deal with it as it comes along. Theyre up there, and you cant wait until tomorrow when theres something there today. There are now a number of ironies to that statement. Ferguson may have known the way it was going to be, but its not like his own club dealt with it all that well. United did not change with those circumstances. The consequence is that they have just completed the type of window that was previously the sole preserve of City and Chelsea, and even surpassed them. The Old Trafford club did not just bring in six players themselves (while still requiring even more). In order to do so, they had to spend more in a single window than any English club in history. The £150m gone out of United this summer exceeds the expenditure of City and Chelsea when they were at their most impatient. It was the activity of a club desperately scrabbling to make up huge ground, as with their neighbours over 2009 and 2010. By contrast, the two petrodollar clubs have displayed relative prudence, completing the majority of their business quickly and quietly. Theyve won something, consolidated, and stopped spending quite like they used to. It is a remarkable inversion, of the type that would have left Ferguson fuming. It is also something of a lesson in the need for the kind of adaptation and evolution that the Scot himself used to revel in. As regards the market and effect of it at the top end of the table, all of Uniteds history and established practices counted for nought. By contrast, they paid the price for the complacency of leaning on those traits - not to mention, of course, the Glazer ownership. It is a remarkably high price, as the transfer fees display. #ZVAVA_KUDA_VANONZWA_CHIRUNGU_KWETE_VANONGO_GWAUTA
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 11:06:23 +0000
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