David Moyes and the Blame Game

David Moyes

“David Moyes – The Chosen One”

This was the caption that Manchester United fans put together when initial mockery greeted the arrival of Sir Alex Ferguson’s preferred choice last summer. Since then that banner has looked as out of depth as his Man United team, finally culminating in the Liverpool fans displaying the ‘David Moyes Is A Footballing Genius’ banner, which would have been as hard to take for Man United fans as the demolition job conducted by the Merseysiders.

Yesterday’s win against Olympiakos may have stirred the passions among the team and fans alike, but make no mistake, getting through to the Champions League quarterfinals was barely more than a formality for United once they were drawn against the Greek side. The victory was unexpected after the first leg loss, but it was nothing out of the ordinary in the larger picture.

The domestic non-performance of the side shows no signs of abating, and a Champions League spot next year now seems possible only in the unlikely event that United go all the way at this year’s tournament and bring home the trophy.

Normally, as the course of action in these sorts of scenarios, the manager is the first one to be blamed, while the board is not often far behind – after all, they appointed him. Rarely do the fans turn on the players.

In the case of Man United though, this order of blame is not one the fans have had to encounter for decades, with Sir Alex Ferguson running the club. After the success started coming in, all his decisions were accepted even if they weren’t popular with the majority.

The man is gone now and so is the surety which he brought with him as he went on achieving unparalleled success. He departed with an appeal to the faithful to give the new man the same time that was given to him.

And from the outside that appeal seems to be the reason why the fans haven’t fully turned on Moyes, thereby making his position at the club untenable as the pressure of following the big man weighs him down. The protests seems half-hearted at best, which isn’t all that bad if you know that everything is going to turn around, but with every passing game that possibility diminishes.

For Moyes, it was always meant to be a long-term game as he slowly and steadily instilled his own philosophy at the club, but the string of bad results have meant that he has had to possibly, and hastily, change his plans. He seems to be bogged down by the legacy of Sir Alex Ferguson – ‘The United Way’, to be precise – while he strives to get the results that he needs.

There is nothing from his past to suggest that he would continue to play with two strikers while his midfield remains porous; there is no chance that his full backs would continue to press higher up the pitch without a proper holding midfielder out there to support his centre backs, and so on. Everything he is doing at the moment seems to be contradicting his own philosophy, but is in line with ‘the United way’.

It is not impossible to imagine that he could have been led to believe that these players are more or less the same players who in the past had played the United way and won the United way. But those players currently seem to be aloof of the whole mentality of the club.

For various reasons, some known and others unknown, the players haven’t performed the same as they have in the past, but are still being persisted with, for which the blame surely lies with Moyes.

And so continues the vicious circle which engulfs the club as the fans, manager, players all remain at a loss to explain why the team is losing with such regularity, thereby putting them in such a precarious position in the league.

The continuity factor that seems to be so important at his appointment is the one that seems to be haunting Moyes the most in his initial season. Until and unless David Moyes can break free from Sir Alex Ferguson’s shadow, his reign at Man United will likely have an acrimonious end.