If David Moyes was Spanish would the coverage be so favourable? Would it balls | OneFootball

David Moyes is coming under mounting pressure.

There has never been such a disparity between how a manager is seen and talked about in the print and broadcast media and how they’re seen by the fans. To the media, if we are to believe them, David Moyes is a successful, defensive coach who upholds some of the best traditions of the game; to the fans he’s a dinosaur who only knows how to play one way. The football is predictable and boring.

Why is there this dichotomy? Both positions cannot be right.

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Well, David is Scottish and pundits and journalists may meet him in the course of life. Do they want the awkward silence that will be inevitable if they’ve spent months slagging the guy off? No, of course they don’t. Better to be broadly positive. Moyes himself shows signs of being thin-skinned. In post-game interviews he bristles with unconvincing self-regard. Like someone who is not very good, insisting he is very good.

We can’t ignore a built-in pro-British media bias. If Moyes was Spanish would the coverage be so favourable? Would it balls.

He shows no signs of understanding criticism. This utter bollocks about other managers being more exciting but he wins more was truly, whiney, desperate stuff. The fans’ problem isn’t that they’ve lost, it’s the manner in which they played and lost. They want entertainment. That’s all.

No they don’t want to be relegated, but that’s not the only outcome if you play progressive, attacking, creative football. As I was saying the other week, because there is no hope of winning the league, your style of play matters more than ever. This has to be a two-way street.

Moyes can’t point to a league position or a European trophy in a competition in which they were financially dominant as sole justification for boring everyone. As usual he is painting the club as the underdog when it’s the Alpha silverback. Their transfer net spend over the last five years is higher than Liverpool’s.

But that’s Moyes all over. Inferiority complex. People do pay good money to see them and you owe them something other than quiet desperation in return for his exorbitant wages.

But this can’t be said in the print and broadcast media because it’s awkward, so the pretence goes on. The gulf between fans and media gets ever wider. The bewilderment of fans at not having their views reflected continues to be portrayed as entitled fans who should be careful what they wish for. But that’s arse-covering nonsense.

West Ham are ninth, likely to finish a place or two lower. But there’s nothing between ninth and 17th. It makes a few million quid difference. Fans would rather be 15th and playing goal-rich attacking football, even if it’s losing football, than be ninth playing negative football, even if it’s winning.

This is the new reality, but Moyes doesn’t show any signs of realising it. To him, league position is everything. It’s not. He doesn’t understand this and keeps coming out with self-aggrandising rubbish which looks and sounds very like the sort of thing someone who is insecure about himself and his position would do. Remember that guff about “that’s what I do, I win”. Yeah well how come you don’t, son?

Where was your winning mentality against the might of Nottingham Forest? You didn’t look like a winner when you let in six versus Arsenal. Look at the Premier League form table. You can’t say the things and expect no one to question their veracity. Except perhaps you can, because the media scrutiny is missing in action.

It’s a failure of profession to not point out Moyes’ failings which at times is becoming so extreme that the gulf between appearance and reality is unsustainable. For Paul Merson to say “that’s not a David Moyes team” after yet another abject performance is a dereliction of duty. It abso-f***ing-lutely is a David Moyes team.

It’s always someone else’s fault, never the precious David, it seems. When a team plays poorly and loses, it has to be at least something to do with the manager. Whether it’s true or not, we are left feeling like we are having the wool pulled over our eyes, or at the very least having something sold to us as fact when it’s fiction. The consequence of this is fans get even more angry and extreme in their criticism, feeling that a loser is being sold to them as a winner.

Don’t be careful what you wish for. Wish for better. It’s your money making Moyes a multimillionaire, after all. You deserve some say, especially if everyone else is lying to themselves about him or are letting personal relationships get in the way of telling the truth. There’s a reason this is his last big job. Everyone knows why, but there’s silence where the commentariat should be.

Johnny Nic David Moyes