As the news broke on Monday evening, the inevitable finally came to pass. It didn’t matter if it had been after 6 months, or 10 months, or in 2 years. The parting of Moyes and Utd had been inevitable for just too long. This wasn’t a brutal assassination, this was a mercy killing. And yet, as the hours rumbled on there grew a curious thing. A group of people, almost all of them not Utd fans it had to be said, that claimed Moyes deserved our sympathy. That he had been handed a rough deal. That he should have had more time. That nobody could have done more with that squad.
Horseshit. There are mitigating circumstances. There always are. But consider this...
An Analogy
After 20 years of being a wonderful Head Teacher, Mr F announces his retirement from St Mary’s Secondary School. In his time there, he has taken a school to the top not just of his regional league tables, but every league table in the country. He has done this despite difficulties along the way. Notably recently, postcode politics have changed his intake makeup. He hasn’t been getting as many of the bright, middle class children from affluent backgrounds and has instead taken in some rough diamonds from poorer districts. But, bar the odd pupil, he has helped polish them all. He has assembled a fine set of teachers around him, the envy of almost every school in the land and whilst his methods were sometimes deemed old fashioned, his school got results.
Upon his retirement, Mr F used his unique reputation at the school to convince the Governors that a friend of his, Mr M, should be given the job. Mr M had done a solid job at a nearby school and shared many of the traits of Mr F. There were a few questions. Mr M’s school only had 400 pupils, Mr F’s over 1000. And whilst Mr M had won plaudits, he had never won awards for his schooling. The majority of teachers and parents did not seek out his establishment as a place to be educated. The doubters though, were silenced. Mr M took over at the start of the new school year and promised to carry on the great work done over the past decade.
Within his first day of the new job, Mr M sacked every single member of the teaching staff that Mr F had assembled. He brought in all the teachers from his old school, despite them not having any experience of the different districts curriculum, or of teaching larger class sizes. He promised that he would bring in a new Head of Science, but the person he wanted turned down the job, despite them offering him more money. It was an embarrassing incident for the school and more so when the job eventually went, at the last minute, to the candidate they initially rejected for the role early on. Still, the new term started and the pupils filed in to be taught by the new staff.
Within six months it was very clear that Mr M and his staff were out of their depth. Despite excellent work modernizing the IT department with state of the art i-pads, the rest of the classes were all delivering poorer results than predicted. In the January mock exams for his core year, the results indicated an average of B minuses where previously there had been A’s. In addition to this, truancy was at a record high. Pupils had lost interest in the new methods the teachers were employing, many of which didn’t seem able to understand the texts they were supposed to be teaching. A couple of months later and parents were actively pulling their pupils out of the school. Fights had broken out in the playground, classes were getting more and more disjointed and results were now at record breaking lows. In addition to this, one particular rival school who had been the biggest in the area before Mr F took over St Mary’s, had risen again under a new head and was delivering grade averages that had not been seen in two decades. Even Mr M’s old school was doing better than it had done in years. They had employed a younger, more modern head teacher who was winning rave reviews for his extra-curricular clubs and a huge increase in pupil spirit.
Mr M was out of his depth but he blundered on. He kept telling parents and the governors the same message over and over. Things would get better. He had a plan for the school. When people pressed him on what this plan was he would merely mumble and shuffle off. One teacher threatened to leave and he offered him triple his wages to stay despite complaints that he had lost the classroom.
Finally, ten months into his role... he was sacked from his job. In his time he had spent more money than the previous headmaster had in three years. He had seen truancy figures at a record high. He had seen playground bulling at a record high. He had recorded the worst exam results in the last 25 years of the school. He had taken pupils who were averaging A grades and turned them into C’s. He had destroyed the reputation of the school in less than a year and turned it into a laughing stock. Kids didn’t want to go there, teachers didn’t want to teach there. The Governors, despite not wanting to take the action of severance, had no choice but to end a relationship that was only getting worse.
There were mitigating circumstances. There always are. Other schools had more money. People said the pupils had punched above their weight last school year and that results would never get that good again. Michael Gove was the minister for education. But the simple fact was that Mr M had failed every single reasonable target he had been set. He had failed, on every level that he could be measured by.
Because, you see. It doesn’t matter if Man Utd should never have given David Moyes the job. They did give it to him... and he accepted it. And as soon as he accepted it he earned the right to be judged by the parameters of that job itself. And that job was the manager of Manchester United football club in 2013. He should not be judged by what somebody did in the 1980’s under wildly different terms. The average length of a manager then was 3-4 years. It is currently 8 months.
There is no positive, no single scrap of evidence that anybody can claim is worthy of an excuse not to sack Moyes. People talk of the squad, of the club, of the market... but they don’t say “well in fairness David did do this... or did do that” - because he didn’t. There are mitigating circumstances. There always are. But don’t you or anybody else tell me to feel sorry for somebody who came into this football club and made worse every possible feature of it over a 10 month period. A man who had no plan, no desire, no fight... and no fucking idea what he was doing.
Laugh at Man Utd. Hate Man Utd. Want Man Utd to fail by all means. But don’t feel sorry for Moyes. Pity the fucking fool.
Now let’s clean up this fucking mess and forget the whole sorry thing ever happened.
https://twitter.com/HinduMonkey
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