‘Happier’ Fred is ready to step up
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has challenged Fred to fill the void left by ankle injuries to his first-choice midfielders Paul Pogba and Scott McTominay ahead of a critical run of fixtures.
Pogba is not expected back until mid-December at the earliest, while McTominay could miss Jose Mourinho’s return to Old Trafford with Tottenham Hotspur and the Manchester derby early next month in addition to today’s trip to Bramall Lane to face Sheffield United and the visit of Aston Villa a week later.
Nemanja Matic has also only just returned to full training after a near seven-week lay-off leaving Solskjaer short of quality options in midfield.
But the United manager has been encouraged by Fred’s improvement in recent weeks after a torrid transition to English football and he believes the Brazil midfielder is slowly starting to show why the club paid Shakhtar Donetsk £52million for him last year.
“First of all, the price tag, that is none of Fred’s concern, and it shouldn’t be because that is just how football has gone,” Solskjaer said.
“Fred came in and he did well to start with. Then he hit a difficult period. Then, when I came in, he found it hard, then he had a very good period. And now he is having a very good period again, showing what we saw in him.”
Solskjaer believes the adjustment to the Premier League was always going to be difficult for Fred but that his improving grasp of English and summer marriage to partner Monique Salum, with whom he has had a son, Benjamin, have been key factors in him finally settling at United.
“He is more confident, he believes in himself,” Solskjaer said. “He has come to a new country, the biggest club in the world, he is learning the language
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has admitted there is little prospect of acquiring any of his top transfer targets in January.
Borussia Dortmund winger Jadon Sancho, Leicester City playmaker James Maddison
The time has surely now come for Mauricio Pochettino to reveal the greatest secret of his Tottenham Hotspur reign, one revelation that has eluded all those seeking to understand his transformation of the club from mid-table mediocrities to Champions League finalists. Namely, which Spurs player taunted Pochettino’s staff after the League Cup final defeat by Chelsea in February 2015 by singing a Jose Mourinho song in their faces?
It is there on page 197 of the hardback first edition of his 2017 book Brave New World, the itch that needs scratching. “The day after we lost that match,” Pochettino wrote, “one of our own players sang the Jose Mourinho chant to Jesus [Perez’s] face. That is what we had to contend with.”
We would all like to know who, not least, one presumes, Mourinho himself – because that kind of brand loyalty from opposition players is not something any manager can take for granted.
Glancing down the squad list for that season one name stands out, and he did not play another game for the club after January 2015 although these kind of assumptions are fraught with danger. It was the cliffhanger that never got answered. Ideally, Pochettino would have disclosed the name of the Mourinho-song player this week, perhaps writing it on the training ground whiteboard, under his farewell message. A kind of ... Coleen Rooney-style dramatic reveal.
It is easy to forget the fractured dressing room that Pochettino inherited when he took over the club in the summer of 2014. “Certain big names had got too comfortable,” he said. “One player who had been at the club for many years no longer came in for training on Mondays.” He gave every player a chance to “rethink and Red Bull Salzburg striker Erling Haaland are among the players United are watching.
But Solskjaer is adamant he will not be forced into panic buys and is prepared to see out the season with the squad he has unless a deal or a loan option presents itself.
“It’s not about ‘x’ amount of money, it’s about who do we think will be good for the club in the long term, not just three or four months,” Solskjaer said.
Asked if those players would be things” and it took four months, he later recalled, to turn around the mindset. Still, even by that February final he felt “the tension created by the transition” was such that he dropped plans for the squad to stay together in a hotel the night before.
What next for Pochettino? The speed at which he has been ejected from the modern Spurs he did so much to build has been breathtaking. This weekend he will feel like an out-of-work manager for the first time. He could be the Bayern Munich coach by the end of next week, and preparing to face Spurs on Dec 11. Although whatever happens next, the expectation of him as a manager now in the top tier of coaches will be very different to how it began at Spurs.
His relationship with Spurs players deteriorated the more successful the team became. In Brave New World, he disclosed private conversations with players such as Eric Dier and Danny Rose and then expressed surprise when it was suggested that this could become a problem. Indeed, Rose was disciplined by the club for being equally outspoken in a newspaper interview himself. The challenge now will be to show that he can manage the biggest names, at the biggest clubs.
On his arrival from Southampton, where he had been able to work away from intense scrutiny, Pochettino was still largely an unknown quantity in the English game. At Spurs there was always the chance that he would be simply another overseas manager for whom the job proved too big. At Saints there was less concern about him using Perez as an interpreter in available in January, he said: “Probably not. Not many clubs want to sell players they would otherwise want to keep in January. Maybe one or two could be a loan but that is not a big money thing.” beaten Chelsea a few times, we have beaten Leicester, we have drawn against Arsenal and Liverpool,” Solskjaer said. “So we need to improve in games where teams give us a different challenge.”
He believes Harry Maguire’s physical strength and leadership will be crucial against Chris Wilder’s team as the England centre-half returns to the club where he began his career.
Maguire has had to work his way through the ranks to get to the top and Solskjaer says it has given his £80million defender a different mindset.
“I came through the back door myself and I like players with a different type of mentality,” Solskjaer said. “I think the academies are great but sometimes you see a different type of player coming through the other route.
“One of the dangers with the academies is everything is there for them. Do we prepare them for this man’s game?
“Harry has come in and been different class on and off the pitch, as a leader but also as a good person. You can see players enjoy being in his company, they look up to him, not just because of his size but also the type of lad he is.”
Solskjaer has been similarly impressed by another of his summer recruits, winger Daniel James, who has formed a potent attacking threat with Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial.
“He is probably the best defensive winger in the world with his honesty, commitment and the way he does his recovery runs and his back tackles,” Solskjaer said. “It is unbelievable, but that is also the base for his attacking football because it gives him space to run into. He is only going to improve by the coaching he gets at Old Trafford, because when you are not fazed by being a Manchester United player then the limit must be sky high.” post-match interviews, at Spurs it was no longer tenable. “We only needed one thing,” he wrote later. “I don’t know which shop to buy it from, but it’s essential: time!”
That was granted to him liberally and he repaid Spurs, although now a new question will be asked of Pochettino. Five years on he is a different status of coach. The level of clubs with whom he is now associated have even bigger names than those players Pochettino encountered at Spurs in 2014. They too will need cajoling or ejecting, and yet the stakes are so much higher, patience so much shorter. Bayern will expect to win the Bundesliga this year, as they do every year. Real Madrid and Paris StGermain feel much the same way. In the early days at Spurs, Pochettino said he lamented leaving Southampton, where he had found a hungry squad eager to stay in the Premier League. At his new club he seemed to have a much unhappier collection of higher-status players, some of whom did not seem to care either way. The higher he goes, the bigger the egos, the more dangerous the superstar grievances. Pochettino has earned his place at a European super club, although that brings with it the challenges of persuading much higher-status players around to his way of thinking. At Spurs, Pochettino succeeded. He charmed his players, or at least those that he wanted onside, and he quickly cut out those who showed any resistance to his working methods. As soon as his success began to take hold, his influence spread throughout the club. He barely had a day off.
When contract negotiations loomed, he might be coincidentally photographed having dinner with Sir Alex Ferguson, or hold forth at a press conference on the club’s uncertain future. In short, he learnt very quickly how to play the politics of the game.
“Fit in or f--- off ”, or its acronym “FIFO”. Pochettino describes in Brave New World how this phrase is passed on to him by John McDermott, the club’s academy manager who himself heard it from Howard Wilkinson. Having listened to the new manager explain his philosophy, McDermott considers what he has heard for a moment and summarises it succinctly as FIFO. Pochettino is asking for total buy-in from the players in his methods. “It means having faith in what we’re bringing to the table,” he says. He cannot accept anything else. But the higher you go, the harder the battle.
At Spurs he quickly cut out those who resisted his working methods