Ten Hag has early deadline to get his side ready to fight
UNITED’S early fixtures next season offer Erik ten Hag an opportunity to ease his way into his new role and then deliver an early marker as to how times have changed now he’s in charge.
Brighton at home and Brentford away are certainly appealing enough games to begin with.
United were embarrassed at the Amex Stadium last month but beat the Seagulls at Old Trafford and they did the double over the Bees.
New boss Ten Hag will expect a perfect start and any United manager should be targeting six points from those fixtures.
Then comes an Old Trafford clash with Liverpool and the chance to draw a line in the sand after the disastrous Ole Gunnar Solskjaer/ Ralf Rangnick era.
The wheels were coming off for Solskjaer last October, but the arrival of Jurgen Klopp’s side in M16 saw the engine fall out.
The 5-0 humiliation could have been even worse and the Norwegian was effectively finished as Reds manager that day.
Six months later, United went to Anfield and lost 4-0, managing to be as bad under Rangnick as they were under Solskjaer. Now Ten Hag is picking up the pieces, trying to put the wheels back on.
The alarming aspect of those twin defeats to Liverpool were how lessons weren’t learnt. They were outclassed in both games but they were outwitted as well, in differing ways the games were tactical monstrosities.
Ten Hag will bring the kind of elite-level coaching and eye for detail to planning that the Reds have lacked in recent seasons. He is unlikely to set up his team to play into the hands of a side as clinical as Liverpool, but will expect his players to imprint their own gameplan on the fixture.
This match is an ideal chance to give an early glimpse of what has changed. It will take Ten Hag a lot longer than the third week of the season to get this tanker turned around, but it will be an opportunity to get people on side.
United won’t be favourites and they have an almost impossible task to finish above Liverpool next season, but if they can make this
game competitive it will be an improvement. If they can go toe-totoe with Liverpool, posing them as many problems as they will pose United, it will feel like a fresh dawn.
To do that the Reds need to make sure their transfer business is essentially complete by then. The window will remain open for close to another two weeks after Liverpool visit on the weekend of August 20, but to get a true assessment of where they stand for next term, United and Ten Hag will want to field their strongest possible side that day.
Liverpool will have their recordsigning Darwin Nunez ready to go, having confirmed the 22-year-old’s arrival earlier this week. The Uruguayan’s presence will provide a talking point, but the Reds were never advanced in talks to sign the forward from Benfica and he was never their top priority.
That remains Frenkie de Jong, the 25-year-old Barcelona midfielder who could transform Ten Hag’s midfield, but striking a deal with the Catalan club is proving difficult, despite the fact they’re mired in financial difficulty.
Midfield is the top priority for Ten Hag and landing De Jong will give a clear indication as to how he plans to transform the team, focusing on adding the control that United so often lacked last season.
The Reds need a forward as well and are likely to focus on that deal, with Antony from Ajax a leading target, once they have a midfielder over the line, but they can’t afford for negotiations to drag on and on. Ten Hag will really want some new faces on board ready for the twoweek pre-season tour to Thailand and Australia.
If that can be done then those players should be up to speed by mid-August and the significant block of training on the pitches in Bangkok, Melbourne and Perth are a real chance for him to get his methods across. With that spell of training in the players and some new faces in the side, it could be a very different United side that plays Liverpool on the weekend of August 20.