Will two points be enough to save Erik Ten Hag?
Roll up, roll up, it's time for another Sunday episode of English football's longest-running soap opera.
For sickos, the events of Thursday evening in Oporto were just about perfect. Throwing away a two goal lead and then having the same player sent off for the second game in a row—and after he’d had the first red card rescinded, but an added layer of sweet, sweet schadenfreude to it all—before scoring a last minute equaliser themselves was just peak Late Stage Manchester United. If their two matches against Porto and Aston Villa were so crucial, as had been repeatedly said, did Erik Ten Hag deserve credit for Harry Maguire’s stoppage-time goal? Did it help to salvage his position, and if it did, to what extent? Questions, questions.
A hundred miles or so away in Birmingham, meanwhile, Aston Villa were having a very different experience of this European match week, rolling back the years all the way to Rotterdam in 1982 by beating Bayern Munich 1-0 at Villa Park, a nice piece of symmetry following the recent death of one of the winners that night, Gary Shaw. Villa now have six points from their first two matches in the Champions League. United have two, and these are of course in the Europa League, all of which rather sums up the time of things that both clubs have been having over the last couple of years.
By half-time at Villa Park there was nothing between the two teams, and there hadn’t really been much substance at all. A couple of shots narrowly off target from Villa, one of which brushed the netting, which obviously elicited one of those brief cheers from part of the stadium which cut short when everyone realises that they have just essentially fallen foul of an optical illusion. But United were well in the game by half-time. The players were up for it. Villa were off-colour, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the result, and by the break a result was…potentially in sight.
Just after the hour came a most curious moment of refereeing, when Marcus Rashford, who’d already been booked, was not booked for a very clearly intentional foul on Leon Bailey. Is that… the rule now? If it is the case that players are not receiving second yellow card for reasons, if there is this force field around them, then the watching audience should probably be told. Everybody gets one? Is that the rule now? It is obvious that referees should want to keep matches as eleven versus eleven, but where is the dividing line? Or is it purely chance?
Five minutes later the best opportunity of the game to that came from Bruno Fernandes, who wouldn’t have even been playing had the first of his two successive red cards (he hit the woodwork against Crystal Palace in their last but one Premier League match, too; he has, if nothing else, had a frustrating last couple of weeks), twanged a free-kick out off the Villa crossbar only the rebound to be shanked wide to jeers from behind the goal.
But by this point, it was extremely evident that this match was going to be determined by one moment if at all, all of which really does highlight the absurdity of all this “He’s got two games to save his job” talk more than anything else. Perhaps Ten Hag did demonstrate something significant on Thursday night. Perhaps he demonstrated that he has got a team that will play for him. With ten players and a goal behind, well, they did scramble to the win. It can hardly be argued that this means that the players won’t play for the manager.
And on this occasion, the moment didn’t come. Well, it did, but it didn’t result in a goal. Two minutes into stoppage-time, Diogo Dalot blocked a goal-bound shot from Jaden Philogene. Was Dalot’s block another demonstration of a rod of steel that Ten Hag has instilled into these overpaid milquetoasts? So…is two points from these two games—and it bears being remembered that neither Porto or Aston Villa away are easy matches—enough?
Of course, a goalless draw against Aston Villa away from home is, for the vast majority of Premier League clubs, a decent result. But United don’t consider themselves to be among ‘the vast majority of Premier League clubs’. They are Manchester Bloody United, and this has been stinging with greater and greater intensity over the last decade, with Manchester City now an immovable object at the top of the table, Liverpool having won both the Premier and Champions Leagues more recently than them, and now Aston Villa pushing harder than them for the top four.
In yet another encapsulation of The Absolute State of Manchester United, it’s difficult to say what the blithering hell is going on without ending up at the ultimate realisation that the Ineos buyout has not yet rid the club of the fundamentally rotten culture that has plagued it for so long. This has now been going on for more than ten years. So much money has been spent. So many players and managers have passed through the door. How deep is this stain?
The manager’s head was due to roll at the end of last season, but then his team pulled the FA Cup out their collective arses and he got a contract extension. Then the new season started, and they’ve looked little better than they did last time around. We’re now into October and they’re in 14th place in the Premier League, and have also dropped four points from their first two in the Europa League.
When the same thing happens for the however-manyth time, perhaps it’s time to ask the question of what is so rotten within the culture of the club which is causing this to happen time after time, including under new part-ownership. New, high-profile staff have been brought through in administrative positions, yet still that cloud remains. There have been other issues. The redundancies. The handing of the women’s team. And why, after all these years, have the root causes that lead to these same things happening yet again not been identified and addressed? Because if they have, it doesn’t look much like it.