Wayne Rooney doesn\u2019t immediately strike as the tinfoil hat-type, but it feels like the mere mention of QPR might at any point lead him off on a tangent which eventually ends in\u00a0vehemence about how jet fuel doesn\u2019t melt Taye Taiwo and Clint Hill.<\/p>\n
The Manchester United legend has a niche and it is carved out in cast-iron nonsense. And Mike Dean poured petrol on that particular dumpster fire earlier this week<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was strange about it,\u201d the former referee said on The Overlap<\/a>, \u201cis that once QPR found out they were safe, the game restarted and I think Jamie Mackie\u2019s on the pitch, he\u2019s going like that and celebrating while the game\u2019s going on because they know they\u2019re safe. They [Manchester City] make it 2-2 and they [QPR] just kick it back and give it to them.\u201d<\/p>\n And that much is true. Shaun Derry, who wore the captain\u2019s armband for the final 40 minutes at the Etihad after a bout of generational headloss from Joey Barton, once said as such years later:<\/p>\n \u201cWe kicked off and immediately knocked the ball into the far corner, as you would in rugby, trying to play for territory. Joe Hart came out and took a throw-in. I thought, \u2018Why have we done that?\u2019. It could have come back into me or into whoever in midfield and then back to defenders and into Paddy Kenny, and then you\u2019ve taken 30 seconds off the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But as chief kick-off culprit Jay Bothroyd added in the same Athletic article<\/a>: \u201cWhen I came on the pitch, Mark Bowen, Mark Hughes\u2019 assistant, just said to me to try to hold it up, try and help us get up the pitch, and then once they scored, he was saying to me just kick the ball into the corner. Literally, kick the ball into the corner, get behind, get back to the halfway line and stay compact again.\u201d<\/p>\n If it was a grand scheme devised to undermine Manchester United<\/strong><\/a> then of course former Shimizu S-Pulse midfielder and Wales international Bowen was the mastermind.<\/p>\n The reality was that a team facing the prospect of relegation for roughly 94 of the 95 minutes played, not far off half of which they had to play away from home against the best team in the league with 10 men because of Barton\u2019s implosion, was simply exhausted.<\/p>\n As with any decent conspiracy theory, there are salient points among the ruins of absurdity: the kick-off thing was weird; Djibril Cisse did celebrate with Samir Nasri \u2013 an old friend from their time together at Marseille<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 at the final whistle; and there were a handful of Manchester City alumni in the QPR side.<\/p>\n Three, to be exact. The precise same number of former Manchester United players in the Sunderland team which dozed to a 1-0 defeat at the Stadium of Light 140 miles away, failing to muster a single shot from the 65th minute onwards.<\/p>\n And Sir Alex Ferguson had an inside agent working for him in the QPR ranks. When Anton Ferdinand feels the need to reiterate four times in one sentence how he \u201cwas p*ssed off\u201d at having cost his brother a Premier League title eight years after the fact, the idea that Manchester City benefited from a light dose of match-fixing starts to collapse in on itself.<\/p>\n Rooney, a five-time Premier League champion, really ought to move on from the inability to make it a half-dozen. Not least because Manchester United lost the title on goal difference to a team which beat them 7-1 on aggregate that season, instigating one of the biggest yet most under-the-radar bottlings in history<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n But mainly because Rooney has unforgivably forced us into The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point territory with his incessant cry-arsing about actual Manchester United being screwed by a team rolling over for one of their rivals.<\/p>\n\n