Dismissal by Twitter
Moyes applauds the Old Trafford crowd after a match. agencies photo
What you need to know:
The dismissal of Moyes via twitter can be said to be a sign of the times more than malice aforethought.
On the morning of Tuesday, the most brutal of one-liners popped up on the Manchester United official Twitter handle that said how grateful the club was for his time. And with that David Moyes was sent packing, thrown onto the compost heap of managerial has-beens.
All those 10 months, the pride of being at the centre of football’s biggest and most visible club all summarily dismissed in one line. I mean what happened to courtesy or does every communication in todays’ world of rapid information have to be viewed through the space constraint of 150 characters?
Of course, electronic media has morphed the world we live in now into one big window with strangers looking in and invading our privacy and us returning the compliments. And if you have the appeal of Manchester United, that effect is compounded 10 times over. So, the dismissal of Moyes via twitter can be said to be a sign of the times more than malice aforethought.
In a way, it could also be argued that Moyes must have known the tools of communication that his club employs. So there can’t be any naivety there.
And let it be known that I am not feeling sorry for the man, it is hard to find sympathy for a man whose compensation package can build a clinic in all 120-something districts of Uganda. But I just happen to think that his former employers could have spared a certain amount of civility for a man, who a few months ago, was deemed fit enough to steer the ship.
And judging from his parting statement and comments in the media attributed to him, this swift execution must have hurt Moyes’ pride even more than the blemish that his abysmal performance record will forever imprint on his resume.
He comes off as the tumor that had to be cut out immediately lest it spreads its cancerous mediocrity all around the club. And yet, by his and the admission of many other people, the disease at Manchester United is much bigger than the opportunistic symptom of inept management.
If we were to be brutally honest, the whole succession process, the handling of transfer business and the players, especially the players and their rotten attitude were all wrong. So in such circumstances, the club could have been more dignified if it took care of business by publically acknowledging everything that had gone wrong.
Then the need to put all this right, even when it involved changes at the top would have been an acceptable and logical course of events.
Instead, the dismissal of Moyes is being looked at as the Viagra of ordinariness. That is not a dead certainty. With crippling debt, an archaic scouting system, an aging and demotivated playing staff, Manchester United will have to overhaul much more than just the manager. And this is something I suspect Moyes’ sense of vindictiveness (if any) will keenly monitor.
For now, the man walks through the increasingly fast revolving door of football management. Already, rumors about Newcastle and Tottenham have hit the circuit. And when that job comes along as it surely will, I suspect he will be asking for the insertion of a ‘professional dismissal’ clause in his next contract.
