MANCHESTER: David Moyes has been sacked as manager of Manchester United after being ultimately overcome by the contents of the poisoned chalice he was handed last summer writes KEIR RADNEDGE.

The outgoing Premier League champions used Twitter to confirm speculation which had been building since the bitter weekend defeat by 2-0 away to his old club, Everton. Wales veteran Ryan Giggs will take over as interim manager until the end of the season.

Debut day: David Moyes and skipper Nemanja Vidic before last August's Community Shield at Wembley

The statement said: “Manchester United announces that David Moyes has left the club. The club would like to place on record its thanks for the hard work, honesty and integrity he brought to the role.”

Moyes had remained outwardly positive about his tenure at Old Trafford. The owning Glazer family had expected some slippage in his first season but not an avalanche which took the club out of the Champions League slots.

Last weekend’s 11th league defeat under Moyes ended their last faint hopes of achieving a top-four finish and wiped out the owners’ trust that Moyes  was worthy of trust to handle a £100m-plus spending spree this coming summer.

Moyes was hand-picked by the retirement-bound Sir Alex Ferguson this time last year. He was cut from the same Glaswegian working-class stone as Ferguson and his appointment met little criticism, apart from a minority among fans and media who would have preferred Jose Mourinho.

However doubts had been growing steadily, exacerbated by leaks of unrest within the dressing room about the new man’s methods. The recent Champions League defeat by Bayern Munich confirmed that Moyes’s United would end the season without a trophy . . . bar the eve-of-season Community Shield. That was not enough to save him.

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