BBC pundit is spot on - overly-arrogant Man Utd star could well end up 'in the Championship'

When I was little, I used to dress up as a devil for Halloween every year - plastic horns, pound shop trident, the works. It was a timeless and trusted costume that brought home the goods and required minimal effort. And then, when I was maybe six or seven, my mam talked me into dressing up as a mummy. Hard cut to me sprinting down my old street, screaming in hysterics, sheets of toilet paper streaming in my wake as the notoriously vicious Jack Russell from number 57 tried to take lumps out of my ankles. There I was, a once magnificent red devil, now resembling something dusty and unravelling, scared into near-submission by a mouthy antagonist a fraction of my size. I never dressed up as a mummy again.

In tangentially-related news, Manchester United barely survived the mother of all humiliations against little old Coventry City in the FA Cup semi-final on Sunday afternoon. With twenty minutes to play, Erik ten Hag’s side were 3-0 to the good and cruising past the Sky Blues. By the final whistle, it must have felt as if the sky was falling. This was a comeback for the ages, even in defeat for Mark Robbins’ plucky side, and were it not for a VAR intervention and an errant toenail, they almost certainly would have won 4-3 in extra time and doomed United to the kind of implosion that lingers long after a travelling support has filed out of the terraces. Then back in again. Then back out again.

Rarely have victories felt so ignominious, rarer still have players reached an FA Cup final against their bitterest rivals and left the pitch in such visible disgust. For the most part. Because in amongst the palpable discontent, one dimly unaware United braggart reacted to Rasmus Hojlund’s winning penalty by sneering in delight and cupping his ears towards the crestfallen Coventry City end.

Antony might be to tone-deafness what Beethoven was to actual deafness. The frosted-tipped fidget spinner, who so far this season has contributed two goals in the FA Cup and a half-decent pass against Chelsea, is a maestro of undeserved pettiness, and seemingly reads the room at a preschool level.

Thankfully, Clinton Morrison, on radio duty for the BBC at Wembley, was present to puncture the winger’s cockiness with a sobering lance of common sense. “He needs to concentrate on himself,” the pundit wryly observed, “because he could be playing in the Championship next season...”

And whether you believe that to be hyperbole or not, there is no denying that Morrison makes a valid point. Antony is a £86 million footballer who would have felt like a rip off at a quarter of that price. He has done little but underwhelm and pirouette superfluously since arriving in England, and the correlation between his price tag and his ineffectiveness is emblematic of a United squad who are far too bloated in their respective market valuations and reputations to be as downright hobbled as they frequently appear.

Ten Hag’s men scraped through Sunday’s ordeal by the skin of their whitened teeth, but it would be no exaggeration to suggest that if they play like they did in the final throes of this near-catastrophe against Manchester City on May 25th, they will get slaughtered. Let’s see if Antony is quite so keen to cup his ears then.