Manchester United under Erik Ten O'Farrell remain as intractable as ever
As another wasted season draws to a close, Manchester United's problems seem as difficult to resolve as ever.
On the 16th December 1972, Manchester United made the trip south to Selhurst Park to play Crystal Palace in a state turmoil. It had certainly been a difficult season for them. They’d failed to win any of their first nine matches of the season. Wyn Davies, signed from Manchester City for a not-inconsiderable £60,000, had scored on his debut in a 3-0 win against champions Derby County in the middle of September, but it took a further six games for him to score again and he’d only added two more since then by the middle of December.
Davies, it should be pointed out, was not United’s worst signing of that month. That dubious honour fell to Ted MacDougall, who’d joined the club from Bournemouth a couple of weeks after Davies for £200,000, only £25,000 short of the UK transfer record at the time.
He’d scored on his debut too, against Birmingham City, but it had taken him a further four games to score again and he’d only managed two since. By the middle of December, United’s lack of goals felt something approaching chronic. They were past the midway point of their league season having scored less than a goal a game and having run up less than a point a game.
They arrived in South London on the 16th December in 20th place in the table, the final relegation spot, and with the pressure on manager Frank O’Farrell reaching boiling point. These new signings had been meant to kick-start a new era which left that of Bobby Charlton and others in the past. But the Palace match offered an opportunity. They were one of the two teams in the First Division worse than Manchester United at the time, two points below them, bottom of the table, and with an inferior goal average.
O’Farrell had arrived at the club in the summer of 1971, and by the end of the year things were going pretty well. United were top of the table having lost just two of their first 23 league games of the season. But then the wheels fell off. New Year’s Day 1973 brought a 3-0 defeat to West Ham United, the first of seven straight league defeats that completely derailed their league season. They won just five of their last 19 league matches and ended it in eighth, ten points off the top of the table under two points for a win.
The match that followed became one of the most infamous of their post-1968 decline. Don Rogers scored twice as Palace won 5-0, and surprisingly impressive though they were for a bottom of the table team, there was little doubt left from television coverage of the match that they’d been given a helping hand by a Manchester United team who played as though only introduced to each other in the tunnel before the match. The result dropped them to 21st place in the table, just a point above bottom-placed Leicester City, who had a game in hand on them.
It was all too much for the United board. O’Farrell, a good manager who’d been appointed off the back of taking Leicester to the FA Cup final in 1969 and the Second Division championship two years later, was sacked three days later and replaced by Tommy Docherty, but it wasn’t until the middle of February and a run six wins and three draws from ten matches that the ship was steadied a little. Manchester United finished the season in 18th place in the First Division, five points above the relegation places and with the retiring Bobby Charlton their top goalscorer on six.
They were relegated at the end of the following season.
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These are, of course, very different times to the tail end of 1972. For all that Manchester United are frequently described as being ‘in chaos’ or similar, but the inequalities of modern football mean that a ‘big’ club only has to be in sixth, seventh or eighth place in the table to be considered in that sort of position rather than the 18th place of half a century ago.
And the idea of them being relegated remains unthinkable, for all the hyperbole and exaggerated reaction every time they drop so much as a point these days. In the 21st century, the word ‘crisis’ in a Premier League sense has come to mean ‘not winning more or less every game’, though it’s difficult to have much sympathy for Manchester United when they were one of the chief architects of this culture of vast financial gulfs in the 1990s.
They weren’t complaining when they were beneficiaries of this inequality, and to a point the very fact that this soundtrack of caterwauling even exists while they’re in 8th place in the table, unlikely to fall any lower, and in the FA Cup final demonstrates that they remain beneficiaries of it even now. If Manchester United were as ‘bad’ as the engagement-farmers and shriller end of their fanbase seem to believe they are, they’d be just above the relegation places in the table—or perhaps even in them—right now.
But of course, Manchester United were back at Selhurst Park on Monday night, putting in a performance every bit as bad as that which they’d managed there a little over half a century earlier. And that’s been their key characteristic this season. Manchester United haven’t been bad, per se. Rather, they’ve been wildly inconsistent. It’s been less than two months since they put in a thrilling performance to dump Liverpool out of the FA Cup. How is it even possible to go from this level of performance to that seen against Crystal Palace or in the match prior to match, a 1-1 draw with Burnley?
The end of this season seems pretty determined show United’s shortcomings off to the greatest possible extent. Last night in Paris, Marcel Sabitzer and Jadon Sancho featured in Borussia Dortmund’s semi-final win against PSG, a reminder of United’s place in football’s firmament as The Club That Makes Players Worse. Sancho in particular has been playing like someone with the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders. Were this a movie, this particular storyline would likely have been savaged by critics as being too on the nose.
Meanwhile back in Manchester, the end of their league season is tapering off. Last season, for all the talk of ‘crisis’, United won a trophy and finished third in the Premier League with 75 points. With three games left to play this season, they are in eighth place with 54 points. They do have an FA Cup final against Manchester City coming up, but it says something for both the priorities of modern football and people’s expectations for what might happen in that FA Cup final that this seems to be overlooked; twelve of the clubs currently playing in the Premier League have not played in an FA Cup final in the last twenty years. United have appeared in seven over that time period.
Football was very different 52 years ago, but the extent to which United’s post-Ferguson decline mirrors that which the club underwent following the departure of Sir Matt Busby in 1969 (and again the following year) remains curiously striking. Football’s inequalities mean that relegation is vanishingly unlikely to happen, but it has now been eleven years since they last won the Premier League; almost halfway along the 26 years between league titles that they managed from 1967 and 1993. What that means for Erik Ten O’Farrell is just about anybody’s guess as another summer of torpor homes into view at Old Trafford.