By IAN HERBERT
Published: 12:00 EST, 10 December 2024 | Updated: 12:00 EST, 10 December 2024
Rather a lot of people seem to be taking pleasure in Dan Ashworth’s sacking as Manchester United’s director of football, don’t they? The delightful farce of a man spending almost as much time on gardening leave before taking a job as actually doing it.
These people will tell you that United are bigger and better than a man like Ashworth. Too important to need someone who, as FA technical director, authored the plan called ‘England’s DNA’ which survived initial ridicule to make the country’s international teams successful across all age groups, after years of failure.
Well, United certainly showed Ashworth who was boss on Saturday evening - marching him through the Old Trafford media room in full view of journalists, to be dismissed, because they just simply couldn’t wait until Monday. Classy, that. And while Ashworth takes the bullet for Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s disastrous first year at the United helm, the overseer and real culprit blithely carries on, insulated by the fact that he’s the boss’s man.
There certainly was a time when Sir Dave Brailsford put some football people in their place without even trying. I remember him meeting the then Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini, 12 years ago - an afternoon on which some of us were invited to report.
Mancini turned up late at the Manchester Velodrome and looked a small and insignificant man in Brailsford’s company. ‘How do you succeed as a team?' Mancini asked him. ‘By being frank, putting it on the table and not bulls******g,’ Brailsford replied.
He was in his pomp at the time, having just masterminded the track cycling success which was one of the triumphs of the London Olympics. His forensic mind was immaculately suited to timed track events, where he could micromanage and ‘control the controllables.’ He didn’t seem to fancy road cycling with its relative unpredictability.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe has endured a disastrous first year at the helm of Manchester United
Ratcliffe's latest move saw Dan Ashworth relieved of his duties after just five months in the role
But Brailsford, being Brailsford - vast self-confidence, equally gargantuan ego and, it should be said, immense intelligence – couldn’t resist moving out onto the road. He eventually conquered that world, too. His run of Tour de France successes is always remembered more than a report into the British Cycling culture in 2017, which portrayed him as a bullying and unpleasant figure, or a DCMS select committee report which accused him of ‘crossing an ethical line’ on his cyclists’ drug use.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the self-confidence in Brailsford, a man garlanded with praise for so long, should morph into arrogance. A belief that the scientific approach to sport which could be applied to sending modestly paid elite athletes out on bikes might be transferred to football, a deeply unpredictable and often nasty world, with infinite uncontrollables and a high percentage of narcissists. It has certainly diluted his significance, influence and legacy.
When the INEOS road cycling team that Brailsford ran for Ratcliffe began to fail – they couldn’t compete with Gulf resources and their prodigious young Colombian rider Egan Bernal was diminished by a crash that nearly killed him - the two assumed that they could take over football clubs like Lausanne and Nice and teach football a thing or two. They’ve not shifted the dial in either place. The last prize Brailsford can claim credit for was Geraint Thomas’ 2018 Tour de France win for Team Sky.
It’s hard to find evidence of Brailsford’s own knowledge transfer, either. One of the many sports science investigations which paid a dividend for him in cycling was his discovery that athletes lose a day of elite performance capacity for every hour’s time difference when they fly abroad. He promptly ordered Team GB’s BMX riders to stop competing in the USA. They complied and started winning more.
Yet during a four-day player break last month whilst United were briefly managerless, we witnessed Marcus Rashford watching an NBA game at New York’s Madison Square Garden and Casemiro swanning around Disney World, Florida. A picture, in microcosm, of what a different world football is.
Ratcliffe says his INEOS philosophy is encapsulated in a ‘Compass’ diagram which hangs on the wall at HQ, near Harrods in London, with ‘Words We Don’t Like’ southwards on the dial. They include ‘entitlement’, and ‘arrogance.’ The notion of cycling’s guru just strolling into Old Trafford and transforming football’s most complex club exudes plenty of both. Look at the wall, Sir Jim, and tell us you didn’t fire the wrong man on Saturday.
Ratcliffe should've turned his attentions to Sir Dave Brailsford, Director of Sport at Ineos
It’s hard to find evidence of Brailsford’s own knowledge transfer across different sports
Football Fever
FIFA have sent me the same press release ten times since Saturday. It promotes some unfathomable exhibition at their museum in Zurich called ‘Football Fever’. Drivel is drivel, however many times you try to sell it.
The governing body was not so forthcoming when there was something significant to disclose a few weeks back. Namely, that the organisation’s own sub-committee on human rights and social responsibility had concluded FIFA should compensate migrant workers whose safety it had neglected while Qatar was building its vast 2022 World Cup. And that FIFA had already decided it would not do so.
FIFA's news release on that vicious little decision dropped in the dead zone at 11.32pm (GMT) on a Friday night – a very well-worn tactic for spin doctors looking to bury bad news.
It is what this once proud and vital organisation has been reduced to under the leadership of the noxious, duplicitous, thin-skinned Gianni Infantino, who lived a very comfortable life in Qatar for a time and who will be preening himself as he declares Saudi Arabia to be the host nation of the 2034 World Cup. FIFA’s glowing report into Saudi’s suitability – a whitewash – dropped in the dead of the same Friday night.
Gianni Infantino will be preening himself as he declares Saudi Arabia to be the host nation of the 2034 World Cup
Rooney under fire
Wayne Rooney even found his parental decision-making under fire when his young sons, aged eight and six, were taken out of school to visit their mum in the I’m a Celebrity jungle in Australia.
He and his wife were ‘setting a bad example’, apparently.
My friend Kate, a brilliant school teacher, now retired, who did not stint on firmness when it was needed during her career, observed when we met up on Monday that a trip of a lifetime to another a continent might just out edge out a pre-Christmas week at primary school, as an educative life experiences for those boys.
I think she had a point.
Wayne Rooney found his parental decision-making under fire when his young sons were taken out of school to visit their mum in the I’m a Celebrity jungle in Australia
Ratcliffe's desert trip
The optics get worse and worse, yet Sir Jim Ratcliffe doesn’t seem to possess the remotest faculty to grasp that.
It escaped much attention at the weekend that in an interview with the ‘United We Stand’ fanzine calculated to present him as a man of the people - ‘brought up on a council estate in Manchester’ - he demonstrated United’s global significance by describing how he once drove across Mongolia’s Gobi desert in a 1928 45-litre Bentley.
Chinese customs officers recognised the name ‘J Ratcliffe’ on the bonnet, he claimed, and shouted ‘Ah, Manchester United!’ A 1928 45-litre Bentley costs half a million pounds, the sort of money and average United fan will earn in about 20 years. He ragged it over a desert.
And my colleague Chris Wheeler reveals how Sir Alex Ferguson, recently stripped of his ambassadorial role, has had to intervene to ensure Sir Matt Busby’s family’s season tickets are not withdrawn, amid a lack of communication from the club. Sir Jim had one job – be better than the Glazers – and he’s failing dismally. Extraordinary to behold.