Man Utd offer an Antony swap deal and Rooney wants to ditch Maguire as nonsense escalates

Manchester United attract the usual levels of absolute guff in the media as everybody pretends that something exciting has happened.

BUS stop
Mediawatch does not often have much sympathy for The Sun man Neil Custis but his story on the back page of the actual newspaper on Monday morning was a perfectly reasonable interpretation of Thomas Tuchel’s reaction to Chelsea’s humbling defeat at Leeds:

‘THOMAS TUCHEL blamed cock-up keeper Edouard Mendy for putting Chelsea on the road to a crashing defeat at Leeds.’

But then The Sun website bod Etienne Fermie got involved and that became…

‘MOANING Thomas Tuchel blamed Chelsea’s thrashing at Leeds on him and his coaches not having to take a long BUS RIDE.’

Apart from it making absolutely no sense at all, it’s total bollocks because MOANING Thomas Tuchel did nothing of the sort. But clicks innit.

What he did do was mention that “everything that can go wrong, did go wrong”, starting with the bus shenanigans, but most of his ire was saved for Mendy and several other defensive mistakes Chelsea made.

But why let the truth get in the way of making a man sound like a lunatic?

Don’t look back in anger
Our sympathy for Neil Custis only lasted as long as it took to read his other back-page story:

‘ERIK TEN HAG wants his flops to take their anger over a cancelled day off out on Liverpool tonight.’

Now he might. But he absolutely didn’t say that.

Let’s pretend
Sticking with Manchester United, the Mirror website are busy pretending that Wayne Rooney has picked a Manchester United XI to face Liverpool on Monday night and that crucially said Manchester United XI features no Harry Maguire.

Are we just pretending that Wayne Rooney has picked a Manchester United XI now? It really does seem we are… pic.twitter.com/xZO0iDZJ7r

— Football365 (@F365) August 22, 2022

They have even put the XI behind Rooney – making it partially obscured – to make it appear as if on a screen behind the former Manchester United forward, who is pictured in a grainy TV shot. Rooney was not speaking on TV (he was ‘writing’ in The Times) so this can surely only be deliberate obfuscation.

They promise us the ‘Man Utd line-up vs Liverpool with double change demanded by Wayne Rooney’, despite the fact that Rooney did not ‘demand’ a double change, he merely said that if he were Erik ten Hag, he would not play either Cristiano Ronaldo or Marcus Rashford. He did not suggest their replacements and his only…