Thanks to my job I’ve had some heavy-duty exposure to the Manchester United marketing machine recently – a John Simm-voiced video profile of their youth academy focusing specifically on skills development.
It was rich with the kind of decorative footballing froth (entirely devastating when deployed by the Red Devils, of course) that catches Tim H’s ire below. One hilarious sequence had Cristiano Ronaldo displaying his outrageous ball control for the assembled awestruck kiddies, all manic jabbing legs, like Twyla Tharp plugging a bag of locusts into the mains in an effort to incarnate speed metal. Never has so much F been D’d.
Roy and Rio were terribly good with the youngsters, while Ruud Boy emerged as the transcendentalist of the squad ‘ slipping into heavy-lidded reverie as he described last season’s rampaging solo goal vs Fulham; to score at Old Trafford was an “explosion inside you, and outside you too.”
Ole Gunnar played up to his cutie-pie image, as prepubescent as the children he was coaching, with an anecdote ‘ “I used to have, before, crisps. Now they measure all your body fats. And I’ve stopped that.” Aw, bless.
Oh, and Mr Beckham wasn’t mentioned once ‘ erased from history.