Erik Ten Hag, and the fine art of throwing a spanner in the works
The Manchester United manager could have made the decision to sack him easy, but him (and his team) opted to not do that in the FA Cup final.
Well, what do they do now?
Manchester United have won the FA Cup.
Today is a Sunday.
Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday.
An announcement could come at any time.
Or one might not come at all.
The press are increasingly certain, and the reaction once the cup was won certainly seemed to indicate that that the end may be near. Erik Ten Hag was front and centre in Manchester United’s post-match celebrations after they won the FA Cup on Saturday afternoon. Would the manager have been the focus of such attention had his position not been as imperilled as it obviously is at the moment? Were the players making a statement? If so, what statement were they trying to make?
There remains a gulf between Manchester City and Manchester United. We all know that. But if the events of Saturday afternoon proved anything, it was that the potential to close that gap exists. To say that the gap has closed takes far more than just one result. We’ve all been here before. When the gap between the two teams in the league is 31 points, you can only start to wonder at how consistency can be trained into a group of players, as Manchester United seem to so desperately need. In the league this season, Manchester City’s points total was more than 50% greater than theirs. One result does not, cannot and will not fix that.
But winning trophies is what Manchester United want, and at the end of what has been by their standards a torrid season in the Premier League, to win the FA Cup is eyebrow-raising. When Wimbledon beat Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final, they’d just finished 7th in the First Division. No-one could reasonably suggest that Manchester United beating Manchester City is a ‘shock’ like that was, but the team that finished eighth beating the team that has just won the league remains a not-insignificant achievement.
Press reporting became increasingly definite on the matter of Ten Hag’s future as last week progressed, and it came from extremely reliable sources. Of course, there is always the possibility that such a story is coming from a mischievous agent or a disgruntled player, but the weight of the rumours became extremely heavy to the point that it became generally accepted that this was to be his final match as the manager of Manchester United. To a point, it might even be considered that winning the game was throwing a spanner in the works.
But this raises the question of what the purpose of those ‘works’ might actually br. If progress can come under Ten Hag—and it’s worth bearing in mind that United did this to both Manchester City and Liverpool in the FA Cup this season—then can the right investment in the playing staff under different day-to-day senior management with this coaching structure yield improvements that are a firmer basis for the team to close that gap? Because the cheaper, easier option is to stick with what you’ve got.
Taken in splendid isolation, if you were watching this match with no knowledge whatsoever of who these two teams are, you wouldn’t have thought that the guy coaching the winning team was the one about to get hoyked off stage left. Manchester United didn’t just win this match. They deserved to win it. It would be a greater cause for concern if all this didn’t give Jim Ratcliffe and his team some degree of pause for thought. If it didn’t, this would suggest that they were incapable of recognising cognitive dissonance, and that could be a problem at a club that has been more cognitively dissonant than most, this last decade or so.
It still remains a supposition that Ten Hag will be sacked, though this may have dramatically changed by the time you read this. Few would argue that there aren’t grounds for it. Their 8th placed finish was their lowest since 1990, and it would have been the first time they’d failed to get into Europe (other than during the Heysel ban years) since 1981. They didn’t make the Champions League, and that’s hard for a club of this size to take.
But if Manchester United are to rebuild, then perhaps the Europa League is a better place to start from. Indeed, it may even be a sign of how ill thought-out any rebuild is, if it’s accompanied by a demand to simultaneously finish at least fourth in the Premier League. No-one’s saying for a second that teams shouldn’t strive to finish as high as they can, but the Glazers were known for having clear cut-off points in terms of what they expected from managers. At least on this occasion the matter has been taken out of their hands.
It’s worth pausing a second to consider what happened to Manchester City. There was certainly some muddled thinking on Pep’s part, with a team selection that felt like the point at which over-thinking and under-thinking collide. Behold! John Stones! Jeremy Doku was left on the bench. City came to life after he came on. But by that time United were 2-0 up and, dare anybody say it, looking comfortable. The best that can be said for City’s contribution to it all is that they played as though they’d been on a bender since the previous Sunday, so let’s all at least hope that they had a lovely week.
Will winning the FA Cup be enough to buy Erik Ten Hag some grace? The club didn’t respond to the reports at the end of last week, and they may well have done by the time you read this. All we can say for certain is that Manchester United have won a trophy and guaranteed themselves European football for next season. That this is no more than 50/50 likely to keep the manager in his job speaks volumes, not only about the sort of season that Manchester United put up, but also why this job can feel so impossible at times in the first place.