Against Leicester on Boxing Day Virgil van Dijk took to 50 the number of successive league games he has played every minute of. This alone does not explain why the Dutchman is such an effective leader, nor why his Liverpool side are currently so successful, but it certainly helps. There are many kinds of captain, many ways of leading, but above all the one unarguably necessary thing is to be present. You cannot lead a team from the stands.
At which point it is tempting to go in two-footed on Manchester United’s Bruno Fernandes, as many newspaper headlines did on Friday morning. The Portuguese is, for a couple more days at least, one of only four other captains to have played in every game of this Premier League season but that run ends with the visit of Newcastle on Monday, for which he will be suspended after Tony Harrington, just after half-time in the Boxing Day defeat to Wolves, became the third referee to show him a red card this campaign.
One of those, earned when he lost his footing and wiped out Tottenham’s James Maddison in September, was swiftly rescinded. The 30-year-old has not morphed into some kind of ferocious, fist-flailing footballing supervillain but he has given his many critics another reason to disapprove of him, his club’s general and ongoing loss of control seemingly mirrored by his own.
It is a curious situation, particularly given that Fernandes this season has somehow managed to be both more disciplined and also more harshly disciplined. The result is that, even discounting his transgression against Spurs, he has been sent off as many times in the past three months as in the 143 that make up the entirety of his previous first-team career, while at the same time notably reducing the number of fouls he commits. On Boxing Day there were only two, neither particularly grisly, but he got two yellow cards while João Gomes and Gonçalo Guedes of Wolves between them committed eight and got one. Sometimes a rush of reds suggests a player is being unsporting when in fact they are just unlucky.
Before the start of this season Fernandes had played 29,621 minutes of top-flight domestic league football, the equivalent of 329 90-minute matches, and committed 397 fouls at an average of 1.2 a game. This season he has cleaned up his act, averaging fewer than one foul per game, and has been booked less frequently: in only two league games this season, and four in all competitions. But before this season Fernandes had been a brilliantly skilled walker of the disciplinary tightrope, being booked once in 72 league games and twice in only two. This season he has lost his balance, and one yellow card has become two 50% of the time.
All Manchester United captains, particularly midfielders, are destined to be compared with Bryan Robson, who wore United’s armband for a record 12 years during which he was sent off only once (a record that did not stop a furious Jimmy Hill from demanding on national television “an instant apology and a public undertaking to be the decent professional we all know him to be”, after he received his marching orders at Sunderland in 1986). “If you are the captain of the team you’ve got to be able to control your temper,” Robson once said in criticising Roy Keane, one of his successors at United, who was sent off 11 times in his dozen years at Old Trafford. At the moment Keane is not just a precedent but a problem.
For all his gifts as a player Fernandes has always attracted a lot of criticism, being condemned to carry, in an often mediocre team, the burdens not only of captaincy but of creativity and general expectation. He is one of very few players at the club with the combination of experience and proven excellence that distils disappointment into anger.
His further misfortune is to lead a side that, because of their history, receive far more attention than their recent accomplishments deserve, and then have all of that focus further amplified by the presence of so many former players on the punditry circuit. If the captain of Chelsea, Arsenal or Manchester City disappoints, there are nothing like so many people being employed by major broadcasters to take it as a personal affront.
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“I’d take the captaincy off him, 100%,” Keane said last year. “His whingeing, his moaning, his throwing his arms up in the air constantly, it really isn’t acceptable. He’s a brilliant footballer but he’s the opposite of what I would want in a captain.” His arm-throwing seems particularly unpopular. “I’ve had enough of him throwing his arms around at his teammates. He whinges at everybody,” said Gary Neville, whose job is literally to whinge at everybody, again last year.
Ruben Amorim was not particularly sympathetic after the Wolves defeat, and Fernandes’s absence on Sunday may usher Harry Maguire, a lesser player but perhaps a more suitable one, back into the captaincy he lost last summer.
“When things aren’t going particularly well for the team you are conscious that the manager, players and fans are looking to you to do something about it,” Robson wrote about the art of captaincy. “I believe a captain can make a difference and influence the course of a match. He should be able to lift players when things aren’t going well and give them self-belief.” The problem for Fernandes is that for all his ability the only people he inspires to increased belief and more telling interventions are pundits and, increasingly, referees.
