Mail's misleading headline does Cleverley no favours

Tom Cleverley’s interview with The Daily Mail is an interesting one especially when it has the headline: I was at the lowest point in my career earlier this season, I felt like I was letting people down... but turning Plymouth Argyle's fortunes around has been a huge privilege

The claim of turning around the Greens’ fortunes is a big one, given that Argyle are, despite the recent upturn in form, still just four points above the drop zone with still more than a third of the season remaining.

It does not look like relegation is going to happen in May but still, nobody is going to count any chickens.

That is pretty much what he said in the interview.

“No one is getting complacent here. We've got plenty of hard work still to do.”

The headline gives a very different impression, one that does not really reflect what the former Manchester United midfielder was quoted as saying.

When I first saw the headline about turning around fortunes, I thought it didn’t sound like the kind of thing Cleverley would say as he is usually very careful about his public comments. The reaction of fans on social media seems to be largely negative and understandably so.

It is far to soon for anyone to be talking about turning fortunes around in the past tense. It is a bad look especially as there are still plenty of people who are not enamoured of the boss due to the results this season which, apart from the past month or so, have been pretty poor.

But he does not seem to have said what the headline suggests.

“Football is about ups and downs,“ he said. "The key thing about when you're down is that you show up and you're always there to be the one to improve it and give everyone a sense of direction.”

Fair enough. And then he referenced the bad run but does not suggest that he has turned anything around.

“I would rather have done nothing else than manage Plymouth Argyle through that rough spell - and that's what it's about being a leader. I knew we had the quality to get out of it, and we will all be better for having gone through that really tough period.”

Cleverley was also reflective of the difficult situation that he found himself in.

"You have to accept when a club gets relegated that most of the so-called better players will leave,' he said. “The quantity of players that needed replacing, I think we brought in 15 new players. There are big risks attached to that.

"There are things we need to learn from. We probably signed too many players, went for too similar a profile of player, we were keen to change the age profile and go down the route of potential and developing players. Did we sign players with injury problems, that have real quality, too much? I don't want to call them mistakes because we've got real quality in the squad, but we lost a bit of balance.”

As the part in the headline about letting people down is connected to this, similar comments to what he has made before and reflect quite well on him. "The difficult part was seeing so many people sacrifice their lives for the results of the football club and you're not bringing that. I saw a lot of people at their maximum not being rewarded."

He then explains some reasons for the improved results.

"We've moved back to a back four with personnel returning from injury,' he admits. 'Bringing in (Joe) Rallsy and Ronan, we've made some good moves in the market. 'It's always my job to give us a direction and we've been really clear about how we want to play to get us out of this and, long-term, how we see ourselves being successful.

'I'm authentic to myself and I don't try to be someone I'm not. Treat the players with respect and hopefully you get it back. No one is getting complacent here. We've got plenty of hard work still to do."

The headline suggests that Cleverley is being complacent and does him no favours at all.