Sir, - I wish to thank Messrs Giles and Dunphy publicly for their superbly explained and illustrated dissection of Manchester United's appalling performance against Juventus last Wednesday. it was nice to see honest analysis rather than the usual excuse laden justification for any poor Man. Utd. performance that one has come to expect from the media.
At last their transient following will have to accept that they are a very poor European side, an also ran in their present company.
The continuous harping about how United were going to dominate Europe, now that they had all their foreigners back, hopefully will be silenced once and for all. They are a domestically successful side, like Shelbourne or Glasgow Rangers, and their "king", as Earn on Dunphy so eloquently pointed out, has no clothes - something Aime Jacquct obviously knows.
As any Nottingham Forest or Liverpool supporter knows, and as John Giles intimated, multiple European Cup success is the true mark of greatness. It is a yardstick by which all pretenders must be measured. Even with the advent of a league system, Leeds, Blackburn and Manchester United have all shown that they have very little chance of ever being spoken of in the same breadth as the traditionally big European clubs. - Yours, etc.,
Cedar Square,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.