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give man u credit

Manchester United's goalkeeper David De Gea of Spain arrives at Soccer City grounds in Las Rozas, near Madrid, September 1, 2015.REUTERS/Susana Vera (Reuters)

It may not be quite the right time to kill the fatted calf, because the problem with welcoming David de Gea as the return of the ‘prodigal son’ is that he never actually went away in the first place.

One thing’s for certain, David de Gea will be straight back into the Manchester United first team and Champions League squad ‘warmed’ by the words of Louis Van Gaal that his decision to exclude him had been taken, not as a punishment, but to remove him from the centre of all the attention that his proposed move was generating.

Welcoming him back into the fold with open arms is as pragmatic as it is inevitable, so United say. Van Gaal and de Gea are the only ones who know whether or not the goalkeeper ever said during the saga, as the United manager claims, that he didn’t want to play, something strongly denied by the goalie.


Perhaps we will never know just who really was to blame for the whole sorry state of affairs that resulted in both David de Gea and Keylor Navas remaining at both their respective clubs despite each of them having been effectively told they were no longer required there.


The talk in Spain is that Manchester United’s treatment of David de Gea has been, not to put too fine a point on it, shabby.


His transfer to Real Madrid, they say, was deliberately delayed before being effectively ‘timed-out’ and all blame for the entire debacle lands fairly and squarely at the door of United’s prickly boss, Louis Van Gaal who, they claim, is engaged in a personal crusade against Real Madrid.


How lucky we are therefore to be able to call upon the various arteries of communication that can help us to discover the truth behind what really happened with the deal that never was.

Except of course that, in the murky world of football transfers just as in life, the truth is very often, not facilitated but, masked by the facts, and selective analyses of the pattern of events that unfolded as the Spanish transfer deadline drew inexorably closer has permitted both sides to build a plausible case for blaming each other for the failure to complete the deal.


Strangely enough, from the moment it became clear that everything had gone pear-shaped, Manchester United fans blamed their own people for the fiasco.

Fans are more than a little cheesed off that a superstar hadn’t been signed this summer and by what they perceive as a lack of activity in the closing days of the market.

And it is Van Gaal and Ed Woodward who they blame, adding for the umpteenth time that such things would not have occurred under the stewardship of Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill.


The main focus of the fans has been on the non-arrival of players like Pedro, Nicolas Otamendi and Sergio Ramos rather than the purchase of the 19-year-old Anthony Martial from Nantes for £36 million.



The arrival of a few players that fans perceive as ‘galacticos’ would have thrilled them, but that’s a long way saying it would have been right. It never ceases to amaze me that people think the mere signing of top names is the great panacea; it isn’t.


What would fans say if the arrivals this season had actually been signed in the last two hours of the transfer deadline? I will tell you. They would be extatic. That is the danger of hyping up the last day of the transfer window -no activity or signing a player that had not been talked about for months feels a betrayal of fans’ feelings. How absurd to feel that way.


Results will ultimately be the present regime’s judge and jury, but in the meantime Manchester United’s main message to its fans must surely be that they have, if nothing else, served notice that they are not about to be intimidated by Real Madrid.