When Dalglish is laughing at Sir Alex, you know that the end is nigh
hroll of the former United manager’s eyes was all it took to communicate he has finally lost patience with Solskjaer
The camera never lies. Sir Alex Ferguson might have been unaware the broadcasters’ lenses were trained on him when Liverpool’s fifth goal flew in, but his puffed cheeks of disgust contained multitudes. When juxtaposed with the image of his chortling nemesis, Sir Kenny Dalglish,
of how fallen, Gunnar the drinking far moment, but Solskjaer Manchester how in all it the expressed has patience schadenfreude now United been with not have lost. just Ole In the complex Kremlinology club, sometimes of this emotionally a filthy look is all it takes. Even when his guard is down, little that Ferguson says or does happens by accident. We saw as much only three weeks earlier, when Ferguson, with a TV crew hovering at his side in an executive box, told retired mixed martial arts fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov of his bewilderment that
Cristiano Ronaldo had not started against Everton. “You should always start your best player,” he lamented. His palpable air of disgust here conveyed the same essential truth: that he no longer believes in Solskjaer and does not care who knows it.
Ferguson was chipper enough when he first took his perch in the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand, a hale 79-year-old looking forward to the 208th instalment of the English club rivalry that has always meant the most to him. It took all of 45 minutes of United ineptitude for his mood to sour like curdled milk. As this shambolic side trooped off after a firsthalf shellacking, he looked down his row towards David Gill, his former chief executive, and rolled his eyes.
It was as if eight years of rancour and dysfunction had all been building to this grisliest of reckonings.
Ever since that sunlit afternoon in May 2013, when the retiring Ferguson told United fans that it was their job to “get behind our new manager”, he has observed the presidential nicety that you should never publicly knife your successor.
At this rate, he might be willing to make an exception for Solskjaer. For all that he initially let sentiment occlude his better judgment, helping to elevate the Norwegian to a role far beyond his abilities, Solskjaer has committed the cardinal sin of being humiliated by Liverpool. A defeat by Leicester he could perhaps stomach. But not a pitiful surrender to Liverpool, which enabled Dalglish to laugh in mockery at the legacy Ferguson had bequeathed.
The Old Trafford scoreboard has registered many an epochal scoreline in its time – that 8-2 win over
Arsenal a decade ago, for example – but few quite as wrenching as this: 0-5. There could be no varnishing the ghastly truth or the extent of the systems failure.
United’s malaise permeates far deeper than their sitting duck of a
Solskjaer has the misfortune to find himself humiliated in a job for which his credentials are hopelessly inadequate. The delusions in which United are trapped are greater. Under the boardroom direction of Ed Woodward, whose departure still has no fixed date, they have pursued a theory that they can simply spend their way out of trouble.
Their default reaction to their post-ferguson status anxiety has been to assert their might in the transfer market. But it is a policy of gaudy acquisition for its own sake, designed to nourish a corporate image rather than to remedy this team’s manifest deficiencies.
Paul Pogba’s underwhelming second coming, five years on from his £89million return, was crystallised by the bovine tackle that triggered his red card after just 15 minutes as a substitute. Jadon Sancho, whose summer arrival had a more grandiose overture than some operas, was left ruefully staring into space on the bench.
United, still talked up by their stadium announcer as “the greatest club in the world”, would prefer to stockpile vanity signings in favour of cementing a defensive system. It can be the only explanation for why, even amid such confusion at the back that they are left with the dismal centre-half partnership of Harry Maguire and Victor Lindelof.
Ronaldo might be an immortal of his age but he is also 36, his contributions here extending no further than planting his studs into a stricken Curtis Jones and having a consolation strike chalked off by Var with his team five goals down.
So much about United’s set-up is bewilderingly off-key. The fact that Solskjaer was deemed worthy of a three-year contract extension beggars belief on this evidence. His few remaining apologists highlight how even Ferguson was given time to piece together a project for the long term. But Ferguson had already won a European Cup-winners’ Cup with Aberdeen by the time he was handed the keys here. Solskjaer’s only previous achievement in management on these shores was to preside over Cardiff ’s relegation.
As the end neared, a few United supporters waved white handkerchiefs in despair. It was a spectacle that captured the terminal sense of drift, an epitaph both for an overpromoted manager and a club who have come to be so much less than the sum of their lustrous parts.