Manchester United

Sacked Manchester United manager was scorned during loss to Olympiacos

Piraeus, February 25. There were only seconds left of Manchester United’s wretched 2-0 defeat by Olympiacos in the first leg of their Champions League round-of-16 tie when David Moyes began remonstrating with the fourth official. Out of the United manager’s earshot, but loud enough it seemed for Steve Round, Moyes’s assistant, to hear, came a shout from a disgruntled player — “Send him off, we’d be better off”. On the substitutes’ bench, there were astonished glances. Had they really just heard that?

About 20 minutes earlier, his team trailing and flailing, Moyes had signalled his intention to bring on Marouane Fellaini up front, a final, desperate throw of the dice to salvage something from the game and avert more acute embarrassment. It was a gut instinct, yet one that was met with immediate concern from Ryan Giggs, the player-coach, who felt that hoofing the ball long to the Belgium midfielder was not the way to go about trying to rescue things. Moyes relented.

The pressure that night must have been intense — indeed, it was the moment that signalled the beginning of the end for Moyes — but the incidents are instructive, the first for underlining the extent of the dressing-room discontent, the second for highlighting the indecision that was a recurring theme during the manager’s miserable ten months in charge.

It has been said that Moyes lost the dressing room, but that is not strictly true. He never really had it, and as the weeks turned into months, the misgivings and dissatisfaction only grew. The overwhelming feeling, which took hold long before that chastening night in Greece, was that he was a decent man who was out of his depth.

The irony is that it required him to lose his job before he found his true voice — Moyes was said to have cut an impressive, forthright figure in his farewell address to the players at the club’s Carrington headquarters yesterday.

There had been moments before when he had caught the players’ full attention, notably when telling them during a furious tirade after the FA Cup third-round defeat at home to Swansea City in January that they were “not fit to wear the shirt”, but not enough. Tellingly, the mood was vastly more upbeat during the first post-Moyes training session, which was led by Giggs and Nicky Butt.

For all the frustration with the one-dimensional tactics and the inherent caution, little dismayed the players as much as Moyes’s poor squad management and mixed messages. Some were overused to the point of fatigue and then barely seen again for weeks, others chronically under-used only suddenly to be hurried in from the cold in emergency situations.

Nor was there any consistency of selection. Rio Ferdinand started seven of United’s opening eight matches of the season then hardly featured for the next 4½ months. The defender’s appearance on that night against Olympiacos was only his third start in 17 matches, and how it showed. Danny Welbeck, Shinji Kagawa, Ashley Young, Javier Hernández and Darren Fletcher all encountered similar treatment.

Tom Cleverley started eight games in just 24 days from mid-December, but when tired legs contributed to him giving away a penalty in the last of those matches — against Sunderland in the Capital One Cup — the England midfielder was barely seen for another 3½ weeks.

At least two players went to see Moyes to complain about a lacking of playing time. They were told if they didn’t like it he would not stand in their way this summer. Others felt he was unable to restore their confidence or ensure those on the periphery felt included.

Under Sir Alex Ferguson, players were accustomed to being told the team the night before a game. Moyes tended to wait until the pre-match meeting three hours before kick-off before naming his and the substitutes only 90 minutes before the game. Mentally, the players felt they needed longer to prepare, a frustration articulated by Ferdinand. “You spend a lot of nervous energy thinking, ‘Am I playing, am I not playing?’ ” he said. “Keep just going round in circles in your head, enough to turn you into a madman.”

Moyes would be the first to reject suggestions that he was harder on the younger players than the senior ones. Yet the decision to discipline Welbeck, Young and Cleverley for a late night out in Manchester — 24 hours after the club’s elimination by Bayern Munich in the Champions League quarter-finals — even though the players had been granted four days off and not broken any rules, seemed strange given what had transpired only a few weeks earlier.

On that occasion, a player turned up about an hour late for training looking worse for wear, but no punishment was believed to have been forthcoming. Was there also an overindulgence of Robin van Persie, with whom there were rumours — always denied — of fallouts and disagreements?

Dressing rooms are no different to offices — some colleagues get on, others don’t — but by the end it was noted that certain potentially divisive cliques were beginning to develop.

Back to Piraeus. On the plane home, Moyes was spotted with a copy of Good to Great — Why Some Companies Make The Leap . . . And Others Don’t, a management book by Jim Collins. It was fitting — a good manager trying yet failing to make the jump to becoming a great one.

Once at Manchester airport, a posse of photographers were waiting to take Moyes’s picture. The colour seemed to drain instantly from his face once he spotted them and, motioning to his father, David Sr, next to him, he could not disappear from view quickly enough. Ultimately, the immensity of it all was just too much.