International breaks are frustrating things. They pop up at the most inconvenient times: three games into the Premier League season, things are just starting to take on some kind of shape, and suddenly - BANG! - England have Hodgsoned all over the carpet, and takes ages to get those stains out.
Still, at least it's given us time to mull over some of the important issues, and come to some firm conclusions. We can now rest assured of two things. One, Shinji Kagawa is the greatest footballer in the history of the world. And two, David Moyes's refusal to pick him is evidence that he is either (a) malignant, (b) incompetent, or (c) both.
He must be. After all, toward the end of last season Kagawa's former manager Jurgen Klopp said "I've never known such a player. He doesn't just have a nose for goal, he has an entire respiratory system for goal, one that harvests oxygen from the air almost as an afterthought. When he drinks fizzy pop too fast, he hiccups the Morse code for 'goal'. He has GOAL tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, and LAOG on the knuckles of his left, in case he looks in a mirror. He can say 'goal' in three hundred languages, including Welsh. If he pulls four letters out of a Scrabble bag, they will be G, O, A, and L. If he's in a crowded room, and one person thinks the word 'goal', he can point straight to them. Why, when he -[
That's enough - Ed.]"
Since Klopp has a beard and glasses and doesn't wear a suit, and looks like he might have a strong-yet-tender embrace, he can only have been speaking from a position of scholarly disinterest. Since his side play the kind of football that makes English side look like lumpen cloggers, he can only have been acting with only the highest of motives. Presumably Borussia Dortmund's attempt to buy Kagawa back over the summer was motivated by nothing more than pastoral concern.
No, he's not like that nasty David Moyes. You've all read Kagawa's comments after Japan's game against Ghana, yes? How he accused Moyes of refusing to pick him, refusing to talk to him, and refusing to grow a beard, wear glasses, and stop wearing suits all the time just like dear Uncle Kloppi used to do? Yes, those quotes turned out to be massively overplayed and mistranslated to the point of fiction, but if you don't like them, then no matter, there's a
racist parody Twitter account to be quoting. He can't feel right! It's just not possible!
Some might say that maybe, just maybe, an alternative reading of the situation might be available. It could be the case that for all Kagawa's undoubted talent and for all his fine Bundesliga pedigree, his performances last season, disrupted by injury and affected by rotation though they were, didn't quite amount to a pressing case to be given the keys to Manchester United's forward line.
It might be the case that the twitchier end of Manchester United's fanbase, still coming to terms with the uncertainties of a post-Ferguson world, are taking their (natural and quite reasonable) desire to see a potentially-exciting and perhaps even game-breaking player in the team, multiplying it by their (reasonable and quite natural) concerns that Moyes might have been a cosmically stupid appointment, and have ended up overreacting to a perfectly comprehensible wish on the manager's part to either acquaint himself with a player who is relatively young, relatively unfamiliar, and relatively unorthodox, or to ensure that said player is fully fit after a disrupted pre-season. Or both.
Speculatively, it could be the case that some journalists are quite enjoying their new-found freedom to write whatever the hell they want about Manchester United, and that some of the more presumptuously nonsensical pieces are a kind of football hack version of the Munchkins' liberation classic "Ding-Dong The Witch Is Dead", though sadly Profile365 lacks the access to confirm whether the nation's esteemed sports-desks have seen any actual capering.
(More fancifully, it might be concluded that Kagawa has, through no fault of his own, become something of a MacGuffin, a plot catalyst that permits all of the interested parties above to behave in the way that their characters demand. Though this suggestion would involve talking about "narrative", and nobody really wants that.)
And finally, it might even be proposed that since the league season is only three games old - for emphasis, that's three; not thirty-three, or twenty-three, or even thirteen, but three; one, then two, then three, then done - it's perhaps a trifle early to be drawing any kind of sodding conclusion about anything at all, you hysterical berks.
But, well, that's no fun, is it? Let's go with the delicate-flower-imprisoned-by-evil-Scotsman thing. After all, it's international week, and it's a straight choice between this and getting all huffy about nitrous oxide. SHINJI IS INNOCENT! FREE THE CARRINGTON ONE! MOYES OUT! MOYES OUT! MOYES OUT!
