Neil Humphreys: Wake up and smell the rubbish, Man United
Red Devils have no excuses for being so boring
There was once a team in Manchester who were so rubbish for so long that their awfulness earned them a sarcastic Twitter account.
Non-League side Hyde FC lost 30 games in nine months between 2013 and 2014, giving birth to the Twitter handle @HaveHydeWonYet?
But here's the predictable part. The fans kept showing up.
They refused to run. There was no place but Hyde.
No matter how incompetent and dull Hyde were in those nine months, their masochistic followers trudged along each week.
Like all fans, they believed in hope. The only way was up and all that hackneyed nonsense.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Miserable history continues to repeat itself in Manchester.
Those who shuffle along to the theatre of drudgery to endure Jose Mourinho's blunt instruments of torture do so in the vague hope that the Red Devils are about to turn a corner.
But this is Old Trafford succumbing to George Orwell's Big Lie. The Class of '92 is dead.
Long live the Class of 1984, where everyone wants to believe in the Big Lie, repeating it over and over again until it passes into truth.
United will get better. United will play with a pulse.
United will produce something, anything, that resembles entertaining spectacle.
But they won't. They really won't. They're no longer programmed that way.
The cynical 1-0 win against Young Boys yesterday morning (Singapore time) proved that.
At one point in the Champions League mess, Marcus Rashford found himself with the ball at his feet and pace to burn.
The crowd rose in expectation.
But he had no teammates around him, no overlapping colleagues. Nothing.
So he held up play. He retreated. The momentum dissipated. The crowd jeered.
That's United's reality.
Mourinho's men required an injury-time goal from Marouane Fellaini and a staggering save from David de Gea to earn victory at home against European minnows. The involvement of both men only underlines the club's decline.
De Gea is too good for United now, keeping scorelines respectable when the performances are anything but.
DEFINITIVE UNITED PLAYER
Fellaini was once considered not good enough for the club, but has morphed into the definitive United footballer, the kind of no-frills, elbows up, head-down grafter that Mourinho reveres.
Club legend Rio Ferdinand played the diplomat in the TV studio yesterday and insisted that the result was paramount, but he wasn't able to move his facial features until they aligned with his comments.
He didn't believe a word he was saying.
United aren't just in the results business. That's a tiresome cliche for other clubs.
Young Boys are in the results business. Even Hyde FC are in the results business.
For lesser lights like those clubs, victory may come by any means necessary.
But United are in the entertainment industry. Providing pleasure for a global audience is a small, but necessary, price to pay for being the world's most popular franchise (and a very expensive brand).
Mourinho cannot have his cake and eat it, too.
He can't spend half a billion dollars, savage his players in the press, drop Paul Pogba, Alexis Sanchez and Romelu Lukaku (three of his most expensive signings) and then send out such a ponderous line-up in a cautious formation and expect gratitude for winning.
If he wants to present himself as the encircled gladiator, then he's got to entertain like one.
And we were not entertained when United played Young Boys, or when they meandered around against Crystal Palace.
We are rarely, if ever, entertained when watching United and never will be.
There's no precedent for Mourinho changing course, no previous example of one of his old clubs changing their identity and pursuing a more aesthetic style.
THE BIG LIE
He knows this, too, which is why his love of the Orwellian Big Lie has been much in evidence of late.
He's trotted out line after line. The players lack heart. The players lack intensity and so forth.
The lie becomes the truth, because Mourinho says so.
He desperately needs the smokescreen because two tedious performances against Palace and Young Boys revealed a tired, fed-up side playing too deep and too negatively. They are clearly not buying into the Mourinho mantra.
But those longstanding faults are no longer the problem. The bigger concern is accepting Mourinho's Big Lie that the Red Devils must play this way and things will eventually improve.
They don't and they won't.
As long as Mourinho remains, United will suffer more pain than pleasure.
Get The New Paper on your phone with the free TNP app. Download from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store now