Declan Rice labelled it “a total embarrassment” and Jack Grealish called it “ridiculous”.
Gareth Southgate was as angry as we have ever seen him in public. Southgate is not a man prone to attacking England supporters, and for good reason, but he had had enough. In March 2022, before and during England’s 3-0 home friendly win over Cote d’Ivoire, Maguire was booed by his own fans.
This has happened before; think Wayne Rooney, the Algeria bilge and “Nice to hear your own fans booing you”. But then, England had been awful and were limping their way through another major tournament. This was different: it was a routine friendly; only eight months had passed since Maguire had been named in Uefa’s Team of the Tournament at Euro 2020; Maguire had not played in an England defeat in the interim.
That was the beginning of the end of the Maguire career arc. In 2018, he became a cult hero, a symbol of England’s transformation into a likeable team with untapped potential. In 2019, he became the most expensive defender in the game’s history and was made Manchester United’s captain.
Then came the fall. This week, Maguire tweeted that he had been stripped of the United captaincy and, we can presume, is surplus to requirements as fourth-choice in his position.
What happened here? Maguire certainly made mistakes and his frame meant that those mistakes looked clumsy and invited accusations of buffoonery. The taunting started, first from rival supporters and then his own, and Maguire seemed to lose his nerve just a little.
Perhaps he became a little too desperate to prove himself and be involved, like a batsman who needs to feel bat on ball and so drives on the up at a wide one.
Maguire was also United captain when United weren’t playing very well. They lumbered and lurched from false dawn to stormy weather and back; Maguire’s own form became a symbol; where did it all go wrong? With Erik ten Hag favouring an approach that plays out from the back, it was a forte that Maguire was always learning on the job.
Like David de Gea, it is surely right to move on if personnel and transfer budgets allow.
But there is an element of the glee at Maguire’s downfall that is a little mean-spirited, rather unnecessarily cruel. Football needs heroes and football needs fall guys, and the mania sweet spot lies in turning heroes into fall guys. So you turn a central defender into a meme and you don’t really care what he thinks about it.
Even Maguire’s nickname “Slabhead” felt like the set up to a punchline – “Lol this big guy is actually defending well”. Were people, on some level, always waiting for Maguire to fail?
Look through your bingo card for the stereotypical pinch points between supporters and players; Maguire barely causes a stamp. He never once gave up trying to get his place back. He never once allowed his professionalism in training slip.
He never allowed his focus to fall away off the pitch, nor behaved cynically to snidely engineer a cheap move. The accusation could never be that Maguire didn’t care enough. These players usually attract loyalty; not here.
Some will willfully interpret all that as a pitifully low bar, itself worthy of ridicule. They will point out that Maguire cost £80m and has reportedly been paid more than £150,000 a week for four years. But then whose fault is that – certainly not Maguire’s.
He did not transform as a defender between the age of 24 and 26, and yet United agreed to a £68m rise in price over that period. He was not the best centre-back in the world and yet commanded the highest transfer fee either through United’s desperation or lack of imagination, negotiation or organisation. He did not choose his wage and did not force any manager to make him captain.
A blame gap exists. When these transfers go wrong, or eventually go sour, it is not the club who held and wielded all the power that gets the grief, but the player. This disconnect exists more at bigger clubs, where there is less patience with wavering form, higher budgets to move on from players who are perceived to have passed their sell-by date and a greater online presence, where the anger naturally lives.
Sympathy will be short for Maguire, even as he falls from England’s giant and England’s leader to England’s “Boooo, why won’t you just pick Tomori even though Maguire has technically never let England down”, and even after he has been told he is no longer allowed to be club captain because they just don’t want him around.
You get paid the money and with that comes an assumption that you can take online and in-person abuse about your form and that said abuse will not make that form worse still or we’ll abuse you some more.
For that, Maguire deserves a break. He may no longer be fit for United’s purpose. He may well not be first choice for Southgate at next summer’s European Championship.
But he did not ask to be a record transfer and did not ask it to weigh him down. We should hope that he finds peace and pleasure away from the Old Trafford Pressuredome.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/X0kQy2a
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