There has been a lack of identity and structure throughout the club so the right manager has to come in as soon as possibleManchester United have all the components required to challenge for trophies – they just need to step things up on and off the pitch.It cannot be forgotten that they finished second in the Premier League last season, but in the search to go one better they have moved away from what made them successful. I think there has been a lack of identity and structure throughout the club which has seeped into the squad. This season under Ole Gunnar Solskjær the players did not know whether they were a pressing team or a defensive side that counterattack....
The least qualified manager in the club’s modern history is gone but the real concern is how he got the job in the first placeEver feel like you’ve been had? As the final notes in Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s long goodbye play themselves out, as statements are issued and narratives massaged, it is worth taking a step back from all that background noise. For all the dead energy, and the ultimate humiliations of the Solskjær era, this has also been an uncomfortable note in English football’s modern history. What exactly just happened?Solskjær to Manchester United was a weird, doomed appointment from the start, one that bled into a weird, doomed, half-life as United’s sixth-longest-serving postwar manager. It will surely be a...
United have an imbalanced squad and a muddled long-term strategy did not help a manager who was clearly strugglingManchester United are a club hooked on instant highs and short-term fixes, where memories are short and judgments are definitive, right up until the moment they aren’t. New episodes arrive twice a week. Redemption is – usually – only ever 90 minutes away.United’s 4-1 defeat at Watford on Saturday proved a watershed moment for Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s management, the final straw – except the humiliation against Manchester City was supposedly the final straw. So too the 5-0 trouncing at home to Liverpool. Or the time they conceded a goal to Istanbul Basaksehir without a single defender in their own half. Continue reading...
United are in danger of becoming a real-time experiment exploring what happens if you just don’t sack the managerWith 56 minutes gone, as Manchester City’s players pinged and tickled the ball around, 2-0 up and basically doing a yoga workout, a team conga in the Manchester United half, Jadon Sancho went to press Kyle Walker, looked behind and saw Luke Shaw 40 yards away watching with an expression of vague interest.Sancho raised his arm and began to shout a complaint. He reined himself in. The forward is 20 years old and yet to carry out a single significant act in a United shirt. He has though, played at the Dortmund school of science. Continue reading...
Club remain weirdly in thrall to a 79-year-old man who has not coached in almost a decade when a cultural reset is neededIt was a few months into David Moyes’s ill-fated reign at Manchester United, and with results in freefall and the dressing room in mutiny, Patrice Evra decided to go to see the only man he knew who could fix things.“Boss, you have to help David,” he pleaded with Sir Alex Ferguson on a visit to his home in Cheshire. Continue reading...