Ten Hag has turned Man Utd into a circus
OLD TRAFFORD — What is most worrying about the latest Manchester United catastrophe is that it is almost identical to the disasters that came before.
Covering this chaotic circus act of a football team each week is a difficult task, given anarchy is embedded in everything the club touches in the post Sir Alex Ferguson era. But the trends of the past decade are eerily, and seemingly irreversibly, similar.
Any step forward precedes two backwards. Narrow victories have simply masked inadequacies – 14 of 20 wins since the start of last season have been by a one-goal margin, compared to 10 of 17 defeats by two or more goals.
United have now tasted defeat three times in the opening six league games of each of the last three seasons. The losses are more often than not of their own making.
Against Tottenham, a United team who came into the contest having conceded 60 per cent of their goals following their own errors, more than three times the Premier League average this season, were caught on two breakaways after woeful passes left them exposed.
And in very recent times, the man responsible for continuing to at least be consistent – consistently bad – is the manager.
Bruno Fernandes’ red card in the first half at Old Trafford gives a man never shy of an excuse a really useful one. The tackle was a dangerous one, high up James Maddison’s leg, but had the skipper not slipped, he would not have made the challenge.
United coach Darren Fletcher was incredulous as he stormed through the press box, with the club’s media team keen to point out, to all who would listen, just how poor a decision it was.
When the dust settles, however, even the most heavily blinkered will be aware who to target with their familiar frustrations.
For a start, Fernandes is in a rut and should not have been on the pitch. Nonetheless, one of Ten Hag’s many failings is very little is changed up week on week, even after being held at home by a team who finished third in the Dutch Eredivisie in their last outing.
It makes the task for an opposition manager with the tactical nous of Ange Postecoglou – a man with some element of a plan, at least – quite straight forward.
Postecoglou knew that if he overloaded United’s right-hand side, with the vibrancy of Destiny Udogie pushed up just behind Timo Werner, Ten Hag wouldn’t have legislated for it and kept his team in their rigid, or “regimented” as one source close to a player told i recently, system.
If Roy of the Rovers was a defender, he would be the embodiment of all-action Micky van de Ven, and with the Dutch dynamo to cover for Udogie on his forays forward, Postecoglou had his way in. And once you have that, and the players to carry out the plan, modern-day Manchester United will, with regularity, capitulate.
A poor Fernandes pass is cut out, Van de Ven is allowed to run, unchallenged, from well inside his own half to square the ball for Brennan Johnson and another familiar Sunday afternoon in the Manchester rain began.
When Fernandes was dismissed, Spurs could, and should, have been three or four goals to the good, such was their early dominance. With 10 men, United were never going to turn things around, thus the contest ended as the skipper tossed his armband onto the sodden turf.
Ten Hag’s position became borderline untenable when the new overlords were speaking to other managers in the summer.
Given a stay of execution, he had to hit the ground running this season. Instead, everything, even how United lose games, has stayed the same. And that could, and probably should, lead to a change at the helm in the coming months.
In reality, after two years of familiar failings and a continued lack of any identity, he is lucky to still be there now.