Three United players fined after night out

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Things That Happen In And Around Football That Don't Make Much Sense To TBB. Today we're talking about smiling. Specifically, smiling and drinking. Specifically, smiling and drinking and dancing and being photographed in the process, despite having just lost to Bayern Munich, in the manner of Danny Welbeck and Tom Cleverley.

The photographs of United players "dancing in the street just hours after Bayern defeat," as one tabloid had it, caused a certain amount of disquiet to a few fans. And maybe justifiably so. Perhaps they should have been at home, agonising over the DVD and vowing never to let one another down again. Sobbing quietly into their Megastore duvet. Birching themselves vigorously, shouting "Mandzukic" with every swing.

Or perhaps there are as many methods for dealing with a terrible day at work as there are humans to invent them. Going out, having a few drinks, and trying your damnedest to take your mind off things is neither uncommon nor, in tBB's, unreasonable, and certainly isn't indicative of anything more troubling than, perhaps, a certain naivety as to how things tend to look once they end up in the papers. (What do you think, commenters?)

Still, whatever your view on that, they're in trouble. David Moyes had given the squad a few days off ahead of their next game; he had also specifically told them not to stay out late. So, Welbeck and Cleverley -- along with Ashley Young, who presumably managed to dive out of the way of the photographers -- have been fined by the club. Silly boys. On the plus side, nobody dressed up as a Jaegerbomber this time.