0% Villa: Rooney signs new 5 year contract!

[Concrete John]

I wonder what the price would be for them to finish outside of the top 4?  Early days though it is, they're 4th now anyway and this won't help. 

[TheSandman]

After what seems like a lifetime of waiting, the tables are turned on the most unpalatable of football clubs and their manager.
How many other clubs, just like ours have had players heads turned towards Old Trafford and from that moment the die was cast? Loosing your best players is hard and for most clubs, somewhat inevitable, but as the old adage has it, what goes around comes around and I have absolutley no sympathy.

As regards class, Rooney's pathetic excuses for leaving Goodison (later to have proved untrue), his behaviour towards the fans of the club he proports to follow and his disgracefull reaction when playing for England this summer prove that he is a pretty risible individual.

But then, despite all his achievements, so is Ferguson. A bitter, spitefull bully with all the grace of a five year old child when loosing pass the parcel. They suit each other quite well.

And to top it off, a moaning fan bellyaching about Rooney on the radio.

Fuck you, fuck your classless football club and fuck your manager. You deserve everything thats coming to you.

My sentiments entirely.

This whole episode could only get better if, as he undoubtedly he will, joins Man City on £200K a week and brings his current form with him. 

As for Utd, Giggs and Scholes on their last legs, Ferdinand,  beyond peaked and always seeming to be injured. Van der Saar needing to be replaced...it's all looking to be something of a mess when you look at their debts owners and the fans with replica shirts with yellow and green scarves. 

Ain't it great.

I agree with both of the above wholeheartedly.

I really really hope that it goes even more tits up at there and Liverpool and they both drop into obscurity. I will piss myself laughing whilst it happens.

I can even live with Man City winning everything instead just as it would piss off the United fans.

[barrysleftfoot]

  Just had a Brummie glory hunter on the radio..."We this, we that".I hope like the other glory hunting bastards they are imploding.
  Could'nt happen to a bigger bunch of pricks.

  Just had a row with an Irish Lplop fan who told me that we are not as big as i think we are, i offered to bet him £20 that we finish above them...he would'nt have it.Wankers every last one of em.

[Jimbo]

The latest news is that Man City have made Rooney an offer and he's interested. They said they'll give him 50 grans a week.

[TopDeck113]

Fergie's statement to the press was a pièce de résistance.  Whilst there's a lot a dislike about the bloke, he certainly knows how to play the media like a fiddle.  Whenever or wherever Rooney goes next, there will only now be one villain as far as the media and, by extension, Man Utd fans are concerned.

I love the time line in this episode.  Apparently contract talks started before the World Cup.  Presumably Rooney knew during the World Cup that when he got back to England his representatives would be telling United he was off.  He then has the temerity to mouth off to the TV camera about the loyalty of England supporters...

[adrenachrome]

The latest news is that Man City have made Rooney an offer and he's interested. They said they'll give him 50 grans a week.

It's a cracker!

[Reality]

Been waiting for this moment for a long time.

[adrenachrome]

Torygraph

Wayne Rooney joins illustrious team united by Sir Alex Ferguson ticking off
Jim Leighton, Jaap Stam, Paul McGrath, Norman Whiteside, Gabriel Heinze, David Beckham, Paul Ince, Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Mark Hughes, Carlos Tévez: it would make quite a team if you could put together those who, over his quarter century in charge at Manchester United, have been snubbed, cast off and let go by Sir Alex Ferguson.

By Jim White
Published: 7:30AM BST 19 Oct 2010

But what an addition to the ranks of Out-take United would it be were Wayne Rooney, the latest and perhaps the greatest former favourite to feel the wrath of Fergie, as is rumoured, imminently to be dispatched from the inner circle.

As Patrick Barclay points out in his new biography of the Manchester United. manager, Football Bloody Hell, Ferguson is, above all things, a gambler. He takes chances. He willingly makes speculative plunges into the unknown.
 
In his professional life, as opposed to at the racetrack, he engages in risk not for its own, adrenalin-fuelled sake, but for this reason: to procure improvement. Nowhere more so than in his attitude to the big names in his team. While other managers are fearful of tackling grander personalities, he acts early, with an often breathtaking ruthlessness; his purpose always to advance the cause.

The first to feel the icy chill of Ferguson's cold shoulder were McGrath and Whiteside, soon after he arrived in Manchester. The core of his predecessor Ron Atkinson's team, they were loved by the fans, their combination of muscularity and skill an on-pitch demonstration of the supporters' image of their club.

Ferguson, however, recognised that their prodigious thirst was compromising performance – both their own and that of the team – and, to much alarm on the terraces, he sold them both.

Next came Leighton, removed after his Edwin van der Sar-like flapping in the 1990 FA Cup final almost cost Ferguson his first United silverware. That was a big gamble – dismissing the keeper between final and replay, especially since there was no obviously better replacement. But it worked, Les Sealey came in and the trophy dam burst.

Since then, the rebuilding of every team has been hastened by the forced removal of an apparently pivotal part of the previous side. Ince and Hughes went together with Andrei Kanchelskis in 1995, speeding the emergence of the next generation; Stam in 2001 allegedly for the crime of writing an autobiography (and those who read it can only concur with the manager's critique).

Thereafter, almost once a year someone unexpected, someone seemingly vital, has gone: Beckham (2003), Keane (2005), Van Nistelrooy (2006), Heinze (2007), Tévez (2009). Of the big name departures over the years only Cristiano Ronaldo (2009) went without the manager's boot print tattooed on his backside.

Until then, it was Ferguson who had always booked the outward journey. The reasons for the sackings may be different – form, age, celebrity, in Keane's case an intolerance of team-mates that bordered on insurrection – but the essence is the same: they were challenging the singularity of the enterprise. The manager's mantra has been constant as he applies his scalpel: no one man is bigger than the collective. Except, of course, if that man is Alex Ferguson.

And this is partly the point. Each departure sends a message to those who remain: any divergence from the manager's path, no matter the elevation of the dissident, will not be tolerated.

When he takes a punt and dispatches a player he generally gets it right; only in a couple of cases has his study of the form book been proven inaccurate. McGrath took the challenge of Ferguson's dismissal and played brilliantly for another five years with Aston Villa. But at least he was replaced, in the shape of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, by better players.

It is perhaps only Tévez, his bustling industry sorely missed and woefully not replaced at Old Trafford, who has, by his subsequent form, successfully hoisted two fingers at his former manager.

Now it is Rooney in his manager's out tray. It is the Liverpudlian's error to have combined growing celebrity and a reckless lifestyle with abject form. Separately they may have been tolerated. Together they poisoned his relationship with the boss.

Yet were he really to shed Rooney, removing the fulcrum from a diminishing team would constitute Ferguson's biggest gamble of them all.

The consequences of getting it wrong are too appalling for most United fans to contemplate. Because without Rooney – or at least the Rooney of last season – what is there left to support? Apart from someone else's debt that is.

[Chico Hamilton III]

I was reading that Times article today and agreed with most of it except for this horse-shit

McGrath took the challenge of Ferguson's dismissal and played brilliantly for another five years with Aston Villa. But at least he was replaced, in the shape of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, by better players.

[adrenachrome]

I was reading that Times article today and agreed with most of it except for this horse-shit

McGrath took the challenge of Ferguson's dismissal and played brilliantly for another five years with Aston Villa. But at least he was replaced, in the shape of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, by better players.

The journo who wrote that is fucking clueless.

[SO Villa]

I was reading that Times article today and agreed with most of it except for this horse-shit

McGrath took the challenge of Ferguson's dismissal and played brilliantly for another five years with Aston Villa. But at least he was replaced, in the shape of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, by better players.

Absolutely laughable.

[Ads]

I was reading that Times article today and agreed with most of it except for this horse-shit

McGrath took the challenge of Ferguson's dismissal and played brilliantly for another five years with Aston Villa. But at least he was replaced, in the shape of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, by better players.

The journo who wrote that is fucking clueless.

If you piled up all of the horseshit in the world, it still wouldn’t be comparable with that absolute load of bollocks. This one of the few occassions when you can quite categorically say that his opinion is wrong. As wrong as wrong could be.

What a fucking moron.

Who wrote that shower?

[Rigadon]

Hmm, it does appear the wheels are coming off.  Only a shame that they are going to be replaced by an even more obscene and easy to despise replacement.  Wonder how many of those Man Utd fans around the country will stay with a non-winning version?

[Colhint]

how wrong can you be

[cdbearsfan]

I heard somewhere that Man City have to reduce their wage bill to fit in with UEFA regulations on competition? That might rule them out from buying him.

I can't imagine him going abroad as he would have to keep travelling back and forth thousands of miles to see his kid assuming she gets main custody.