Fifty-five years have passed since James Brown, singer, songwriter and minister of new super-heavy funk, released a song about people who “like a dull knife [that] just ain’t cutting”, were “talking loud and saying nothing”. Manchester United would probably have preferred to prompt thoughts of Brown’s I Feel Good but they are where they are – and if they ever do shake their money-makers they could probably then benefit from dropping a few of them. Sometimes we don’t get to choose which 70s deep funk classic we unwittingly call to mind, and Ruben Amorim left no doubt when after Wednesday night’s ineffably miserable defeat by Grimsby he opined about feeling “my players spoke really loud today … At half-time I told them that they were speaking really loud to me. I understand what you are doing, what I am seeing.” Like a dull knife, they just weren’t cutting.
In this way United’s players contrasted pleasingly with Grimsby’s fans, who while also talking loud were definitely saying something, specifically about someone getting sacked in the morning.
If only the Portuguese could work out how to inspire his charges to get up (get on up). At a push he might be able to take ’em to the bridge, but they would almost certainly then want to jump off it. And now many are doubting whether Amorim will even be able to stay on the scene – like, for example, a lovin’ machine.
United’s Super Bad display turned the evening into a classic coastal Milk Cup tie, complete with wildly overperforming minnows (perhaps better described as haddocks on this occasion), wildly overpaid international megastars resembling fish out of water, and a joyful, disbelieving pitch invasion. “I’ve been fortunate enough to go to the FA Cup, European Championship and Champions League finals, but the atmosphere here absolutely trumps them,” said Polly Bancroft, Grimsby’s CEO.
It was a game in which United managed to humiliatingly lose, somehow recover, almost win and then humiliatingly lose again. “The way we started the game, we were not even here,” mumbled Amorim, who spent key periods of the match ignoring the action completely in favour of dementedly shuffling tokens around a laminated pitch map, and then the decisive shootout ignoring both the action and his toys while fully focusing on his footwear.
It took 26 penalties to split the teams, in the end. This was partly because one goalkeeper, while making genuine attempts to reach the spot-kicks, appeared happy when he succeeded simply to help them on their way into the net, while the other’s technique involved flinging himself to the ground several seconds before most of them were actually taken. “I’m a Man United fan, so I’m half-fuming,” Grimsby keeper Christy Pym explained at the end – and these days they’re the ones who are most likely to be in a funk.
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Max Aarons’ eighth-minute red card also probably didn’t help. Photograph: Dave Winter/Shutterstock
