Sports editor supremo Sir HOWARD ELSTON reports on how Manchester United are reeling after their terrible start to the new season.

Manchester United boss David Moyes has told me in a hush-hush 121  soul-baring interview that he  is still searching for the right balance after the teams’ terrible start to the new year.

United face Shakhtar in the Champions League  tonight after Saturday’s 2-1 defeat by West Brom signalled their worst league beginning in 24 years.

“‘Our lads are overpaid, mean-spirited, pretty thick,and pampered beyond all proportion.” said Moyes, aged 50. “When I were a lad, I was delivering evening papers, working in the coal mines, chopping kindling at 5am and had already done two tours of duty in Northern Ireland with the SAS.

‘We need to change.’

“All these spoiled braindead punks do is collect their seven figure fees from their agents and snort it up their noses in Malaga nightclubs.’

Sipping a diet Coke and reading the fabulously riveting new scoop in the Daily Express which relates how Princess Di was about to secretly marry a Doncaster postie and dedicate her life to open heart surgery, he added: “We will be introducing a new regime to kickstart the lads.”

Manchester United’s top scorers

His plan goes something like this:

• All players must drive a  1.1  Kia
• They must hold a UK passport
• They must know how to read joinedy-up writing
• They must have arms that bear no tats of Hindu prayers, Hebrew incantations or images of Neil Kinnock
  
• They must have seen the full range of Jane Austen movies and written 1500 word essays on the leitimotifs in each novel

Moyezee is to post these hardline provisos on the Manchester United locker room door. “Those who don’t adhere to the new rules, he said, or don’t know enough English to understand what they say, will be sold to  Newcastle.

‘I’m playing hardball. And that’s the truth.” he told me.

  @sirhowardelston