Proposal: relegate Manchester United - The Square Ball 7/5/22

MAKE A BETTER WORLD

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

Usually when running my finger down the Premier League table, picking out teams for exile, I choose Brighton. In each of the last four seasons since they were promoted, Brighton have won exactly nine games, and what’s the point in that? Send them down. This season they have pushed past that total, but they’d been dreary in a different way before this weekend: winning just three at home, none in 2022, scoring only twelve goals in seventeen home matches. It has been obvious for years that all Brighton really need is a really good striker to become a really good team, but they just won’t buy one. They’ve been short changing their fans, and a spell in the Championship might shake them up a bit.

But if that was how Brighton looked on Friday, what does Saturday’s 4-0 win over Manchester United say? It says that the punishment of Ralf Rangnick’s Reds shouldn’t end with giving Brighton a quarter of their season’s home goals in one game. It should continue with them being placed at the bottom of the Premier League table and relegated, with all the teams currently below them moving up one place.

Why should Leeds, Everton and Burnley fans suffer the stress of worrying which of our teams will go down over the next two weeks, while what used to be an efficient Sharp camcorder sales machine clanks around the Premier League playing like this? Two of Brighton’s scorers had never scored a goal for them before. They can’t have expected to be using David De Gea’s goal for milestones and Cristiano Ronaldo style stat-padding. The Red Devils have doused their forks in the ship canal and completely and totally given up, and if only there was more of the season left, they would be losing enough games to be relegating themselves. We shouldn’t let the lack of fixtures stop that. If it comes to it, make them play everybody again. I can think of one team in West Yorkshire that would love a swing at them in this mode.

The true highlight of this game was a near miss. Mind what I said about Brighton lacking strikers. But at 4-0 up Pascal Gross and Alexis Mac Allister waltzed through the middle on the way to a fifth, but didn’t get it, because they started tapping the ball back and forth between them, completely taking the piss. Amid gales of sarcastic laughter in the penalty area, they hit the post. When the most expensive team in the world has reached the point that, with half an hour to play, Brighton & Hove Albion are Harlem Seagulling through the back line, that team should be stripped of all its points and demoted.

Obviously we have to spare a thought for the fans. Not the screaming online Goldbridge ilk, but the surviving band of devotees who navigated this nation’s decrepit transport systems to get from Salford to Brighton, generously estimated as a five hour journey, just to watch faded heroes like Ronaldo and Bruno Fernandes taking turns, at 4-0 down, at taking tame pot shots from long range so the cameras could film them looking agonised when the keeper made a simple save. Spare a thought for those fans, because it’s really, really funny to think about.

Unfortunately, as I look ahead to Sunday’s fixtures, all feelings of fun drain away from me. I feel very tense about Leeds playing at Arsenal while Everton are at Leicester. Burnley being comprehensively beaten 3-1 by Aston Villa on Saturday helped my mood, especially knowing the Claret and Blues have to visit the Claret and Blues and play the Claret and Blues again in two weeks. But while I have no love for Everton or Burnley, I have to admit to some grudging respect. Everton are a grand old club making a game fight for survival despite the dimwit baby guarding their dugout (and for the avoidance of doubt, Duncan Ferguson, I do not mean you). Burnley hit the crazy button by sacking Sean Dyche but there’s no arguing with their one good week of wins. I hope that’s all over and done with now, but really, adding our own sweet beloved United’s W3 D2 L1 record, haven’t all three teams done more than enough lately to prove they want and deserve to stay in the Premier League? Why should any of us have to suffer any more?

Move Manchester United to 20th in the Premier League, decide the relegated teams right now are them, Norwich and Watford, and let the rest of us in the bottom half of the table party our way to the end. The TV companies can concentrate on hyping up the title race without pretending that watching bad teams play badly is also entertaining to the general public. Manchester United have even been fulfilling that function, but they’ve only one game left now and besides, watching something so bad it’s good is only fun for so long. We the people can not enjoy Manchester United ironically forever, not without new material, anyway. And there will be plenty of that in the Championship!