If nothing else, this weekend will at least tell us whether the Ineos crew that run Manchester United are Malcolm Tucker devotees. This month marks 15 years since the episode of The Thick Of It in which the dark prince of government spin assured a bungling minister that she wasn’t, in fact, going to get the bullet just a week into her tenure.
“The PM is not going to sack you after a week,” he soothed Nicola Murray in the back of her ministerial car. “Sacked after 12 months, looks like you’ve f**ked up. Sacked after a week, looks like he’s f**ked up.”
Ineos gave Erik Ten Hag a new contract in the summer. In footballing terms, getting shot of him now is sacked-in-a-week territory. Even if Aston Villa duff his United side up this weekend, that might be enough to save him. We’ll see.
United have started the season in exactly the sort of way Ten Hag needed them not to start it. Two wins from six games in the Premier League, back-to-back draws against Twente and Porto in Europe. Shapeless and jumbled at the back, toothless and idle in attack. The kind of rabble that makes the other rabbles think that maybe life isn’t so bad after all.
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The Villa game will be his 125th in charge. That’s more than Louis Van Gaal got (103) and towers over the 51 that spanned the David Moyes era. He’s 20 games short of Jose Mourinho’s term (144) and would only need to see out the season with a couple of middling cup runs to pass Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (168).
Ten Hag is in his third season. He has overhauled the playing squad to the point where 12 of the 16 players who featured against Tottenham last Sunday were given their United debut by him. He’s spent the thick end of £600 million (€718 million) on 13 players and got another eight in on loan or for free.
[ Harry Maguire salvages Europa League point for Manchester United against PortoOpens in new window ]
Yet here they are, 13th in the Premier League after six games and sandwiched between the giants of Braga and Viktoria Plzeň in the Europa League. He’s had time, he’s had money. Things should be so much better than this.
There’s an interesting parallel to be drawn with the doldrum years experienced by Liverpool a generation ago. Because in a way, this is just history repeating itself. Both clubs dominated English football for so long, it seemed silly to imagine they would ever be out of the picture. Yet that’s exactly what has happened, first to Liverpool and now to United.
In May 1991, Liverpool had finished either first or second in the league in 17 out of the previous 18 seasons. In May 2013, United had finished either first or second in 19 out of the previous 22. It wasn’t just that they won the most titles, it was that they were always the team to beat. For two decades apiece, they set the context for every English league season.
And then, a sudden and shocking nothing. In Liverpool’s next four full seasons after Kenny Dalglish left in ‘91, they finished sixth, sixth, eighth and fourth. In the four United seasons following Alex Ferguson, they went seventh, fourth, fifth and sixth. There was nothing gradual or piecemeal about it for either club – one day, they were the only big beasts marauding across the landscape; next thing they knew, they were just another noise in the jungle.
Liverpool’s demise is not so long ago, of course. There are plenty of United fans who remember those years as if they were yesterday, an era of untrammelled glee. You had the initial Souness sorrows, the comedy stylings of Evans/Houllier, Rafa’s facts, dear old clambering Roy Hodgson, King Kenny’s nostalgia tour, the unpersuasive shaping of Brendan Rodgers. Those were some damn good times if you were a United fan. Schadenfreude on tap.
Payback’s a b**ch, though. The speed of the turnaround in United’s fortunes has been a supernova of joy for those laughing in from the outside. It started with the dour months of Moyes and continued through Van Gaal’s haughty shortcomings, Mourinho’s ego trip, Solskjaer’s nostalgia tour and the slightly weird Ralf Rangnick interlude, the point of which still nobody seems to be entirely sure of.
And now there’s Ten Hag, his jaw jutting grimly out from atop that polo-neck, his pencil scribbling in that little notepad, his team flailing away like an outboard motor with no boat attached. They’ve kept two clean sheets in their last 14 games in Europe, conceding at a demented rate of two goals a game. It would be one thing if those matches were at least in the Champions League but the majority of them have been in the Europa League against lowly opposition.
In some respects, the similarities with Liverpool hold true to quite a spooky extent. This is United’s 13th season since Ferguson left, in which time their trophy haul reads two FA Cups, two League Cups and a Europa League. In the equivalent seasons after 1991, Liverpool’s trophy haul was identical, albeit the Europa League was called the Uefa Cup in those days.
[ Liverpool's treble has a golden hueOpens in new window ]
But even that feels like it’s gilding the lily for the current iteration of Manchester United. That Liverpool team had just won three cup titles in one season and contained the reigning Ballon D’Or winner in Michael Owen. They were involved in title races well into the spring of 2001 and 2002. They kept the flow of FA Cups and League Cups coming and were only a couple of seasons away from winning the Champions League.
The only part of that picture that applies to Ten Hag’s United is the stockpiling of domestic cups. By any sane assessment, they are light years off a title race and haven’t had a Ballon D’Or contender since 2008. And at a time when they can’t get a result against Porto or Twente, nobody is pretending they are going to be a factor in the Champions League any time soon.
They are in far worse shape now than Liverpool were then, in other words. And still Anfield had to wait more than a decade and a half to see another league title. Regardless of how long Ten Hag lasts, the road ahead for United feels long and grim.
