Voltar
Bruno Fernandes is a lot like sex in a car – it sounds great in theory, but in reality it's undignified, uncomfortable, and absolutely not worth the hassle. The fact that bozo can win PFA Player of the Year and still seem more problematic than Richard Keys at a women's rights march sums everything up.
Granted, Fernandes isn't the only reason Manchester United are a mess. But his Cristiano-ified petulance is keeping the club firmly stuck in the mud.
It's the same suffocating, main-character pantomime – all theatrical arm-waving and blaming everybody else. Frankly, he's about as qualified to wear the armband as Captain Birdseye.
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But at least with Ronaldo, the delusion is genuine – the man honestly believes he's a demigod sent from heaven to be spoon-fed tap-ins by his peasant team-mates.
Bruno is far sneakier. He's a performative, imposter of a captain. He's like one of those shameless TikTokers who won't hand a sandwich to a homeless man unless someone is filming – everything he does is calculated optics.
The arm-flapping, the constant moaning, the half-hearted pressing – it's all cheap theatre to let the fans know: "I'm the only one who's trying. Don't blame me."
Michael Carrick was absolutely right to drop him on Sunday, even if it costs him his job. For all his impact on paper, Fernandes is as much of a difference-maker as sprinkling parsley on road kill.
He'll rack up his cheap penalties and corner assists as usual, but when United actually need a talisman to grab the game by the scruff of the neck, he's as absent as Kyle Walker at his second family's Christmas dinner.
The fact that Harry Kane only narrowly scraped winning the Ballon d'Or is a total farce.
I'm not saying he should have won by a landslide, but handing the award to anyone else this year would have been obscenely dumb – like Jack Grealish trying to solve a cryptic crossword.
Had England won the World Cup or Bayern Munich lifted the Champions League, Kane would have bulldozed the competition like Boris Johnson flattening that Japanese kid.
But because football discourse has been rotted by Twitter stat-s***gers who genuinely believe individual ability is just a tally of team trophies and social media followers, we had to pretend it was a close contest. In reality, it was about as close as Harry Maguire's eyebrows are to his hairline.
Lamine Yamal – who, for some reason, turned up at the ceremony with a sea anemone taped to his blazer – was shoehorned into the race with all the awkwardness of John Terry trapped in a broken lift with Wayne Bridge.
Kylian Mbappe's inclusion felt manufactured too. Sure, he scored a bunch of goals – but his main contribution last season was rivalling Vinicius Jr for being the most poisonous thing to hit Madrid since the outbreak of Spanish flu.
Kane outscored, outperformed and outclassed everyone. But because England and Bayern lost in the semi-finals, he almost got robbed – proof that Restore voters aren't the only ones who shouldn't be trusted anywhere near a ballot paper.