Along with David De Gea, Phil Jones was the last of the 2012-13 Alex Ferguson title winners remaining at Old Trafford. Photo: Matthew Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images
Manchester United fans are legitimately both embarrassed and deeply disappointed at the news announced on Friday that Phil Jones would finally leave the club after 12 years. at the end of the season.
Sympathy for Jones in his horrendous battle with injuries that have seen him make just four Premier League appearances in the past four seasons, three of them lost and one 3 :3. a draw at Sheffield United when it looked like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was throwing a lamb to the slaughter.
Sympathy for the terrible insults he endured on social media — when he was often reduced to violent memes, remorselessly ridiculed for his contorted expression as he rushed to the ball, a tragicomedy figure on Twitter — and even, just as grimly, on the street outside his house .
In a 2021 interview, Jones recounted how he was walking through the Cheshire village of Hale with his three-year-old daughter, Alaria, and pushing her little sister, Ray, in a stroller, when a worker passed by and suddenly unloaded. “Hey Phil… you are shit. You suck!”
I also feel sorry for the fact that the struggle to get back in shape, long after others may have given up, ended in more despair and disappointment.
A letter to the fans. pic.twitter.com/fmNV1eR9np
— Phil Jones (@PhilJones4), May 19, 2023
«I've been working hard, working hard,» he told United club media in an emotional interview just released. “I literally left no stone unturned. I've tried to get back as quickly as possible every time I've been away from home for the last couple of years.
“The last couple of years have been really hard. This cannot be denied. There is nowhere to hide from this. My family has been a huge part of keeping me on track and keeping me focused so that I try to get in shape and try to play more. And you know, I miss football. I missed it.
Jones, according to United, will need some time before he decides on his next move. At 31, with his body failing him more than ever, you wonder if there will be a moment in the not-too-distant future when the former England defender will finally have to admit defeat and retire. This is a hard enough reality for players who have gone on to fulfill their careers, but even harder for those who have never been able to reach their true potential, in the case of Jones due to injury.
Yet it's also easy to see why United fans have experienced a certain degree of anger and annoyance every time Jones's name has come up over the past few years. Not anger and annoyance at Jones, but how a club once described by Sir Alex Ferguson as «a bus that waits for no one» could go so far as to consider it reasonable to hand out a new four-and-a-half-year contract to a player who had spent just 56 league games over the previous three-plus years and more and more frustrated? Jones has never reached 30 Premier League starts in a season for United and has only topped 20 starts in the competition four times in 12 campaigns.
Indeed, this February 2019 contract decision is still one of the clearest symbols of United's mismanagement in the post-Ferguson era. It involved the constant lowering of expectations, the corrosion of the high bar set by the Scots, and was the most extreme example of the twisted view that they were «protecting value» when for everyone else they were running the most false economy.
Phil Jones' last four seasons at Manchester United have been derailed by injury. Photo: Martin Rickett/PA Wire. place a charitable cycle of weak indulgence has taken root. It's a cycle that United fans are still waiting for to be broken and hoping that ruthlessness will finally return at Old Trafford this summer under Erik ten Hag.
United have certainly backed Jones, but there's a huge difference between caring for and supporting a man's struggle and overlooking the club's day-to-day goals.
Was Jones taken by surprise by this decision? Sure, and it's sad. Few will argue that this was a player who threw everything he had on the field — even if it often hurt him when you yearned for someone to grab him and ask him to calm down a bit — and then the same was true. in those lonely and desperately lonely battles to get back in shape.
Jones would have been eligible for recognition at United, but it's a mark of a man that even in dark times he was able to joke above oneself. “Besides my mom and dad, who else will show up?” he would say with a wry smile.
For a player who was once trumpeted, it must be said rather dizzyingly as the next Duncan Edwards in Ferguson's creation, it's sad how it ended for Jones. Likewise, United should have said goodbye long before this moment.
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