Solskjaer challenges Klopp
From Pogba at a Paris fashion show to still paying Sanchez £175,000 a week, United and their beleaguered manager have so many issues that need to be resolved with conviction
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer threw down the gauntlet to runaway leaders Liverpool ahead of today’s Anfield clash, goading counterpart Jurgen Klopp that his side would only emulate Manchester United by becoming serial winners.
Solskjaer, who scored the winner in the 1999 Champions League final to add to United’s league and FA Cup glory that same season, made it clear that Sir Alex Ferguson’s relentless pursuit of winning represented the gold standard for others to match.
United went on to add successive titles in 2000 and 2001 before Ferguson repeated the feat of three titles in a row from 2007.
The United manager, reflecting on 1999, said: “That showed as a squad we could cope with three tournaments. It was an amazing season, an amazing group. I’m sure with Liverpool, they can win all three. But let’s see in May. You have to do it again and again. Sir Alex had an exceptional way of motivating us and getting us ready. Win them and move forward.”
Of the teams’ intense rivalry, Klopp said: “In the good old times, you saw it as a special fixture because everyone flew at each other and kicked each other off the pitch. I don’t want to see that. We want to win the game, not one little battle here or there.”
Meanwhile, United are refusing to meet Sporting Lisbon’s €80 million (£68 million) valuation of attacking midfielder Bruno Fernandes.
There will have been many considerations running through the mind of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer when he resolved at last to send on Marcus Rashford for the final stages of a hitherto goalless FA Cup replay on Wednesday night, and no doubt in the moment the decision will have made sense.
The FA Cup offers Manchester United some salvation this season, and Solskjaer could make the case privately, if not publicly, that a win outweighed the importance of a league game away at Liverpool, which most expect United to lose anyway. The next three points in the long struggle to challenge for the Champions League places are likely not coming at Anfield today – but an FA Cup defeat? That might cast a different kind of shade on the manager.
He knew that Rashford had been nursing a back injury for weeks and was substituted at Norwich City to that end. It was a risk to bring him on against Wolverhampton Wanderers, and so it proved: victory but at a price.
If Solskjaer picks Rashford for Anfield he will do so knowing that the risk is even greater this time, with a set of implications that go far beyond the weekend. This is how it is when a manager is buying himself time with every game, when it feels like every moment of every match, every injury, every setback, is dictating to him – rather than the other way around.
It is that which stands out about the United of 2020, almost seven years on from the passing into history of Sir Alex Ferguson, as this strange patchwork team of the half-fit, the young, the old and the disenchanted go to Anfield. Not so much that Liverpool are on the brink of escaping the prison of their title curse, or that United look so far from their next one. But more that Solskjaer and United have so little control over events, forever reacting, changing, fighting the consequences of whatever decision they were so sure was right one year ago, or six months past.
They live from game to game, largely reliant now on a 22-year-old striker who, so to speak, was injured before he was injured on Wednesday. As for his defence, Solskjaer will have to consider whether Eric Bailly can be risked for his first involvement in a match since April, outside the closed-doors practice game that was arranged at Carrington this week. When will Luke Shaw be fit and available? Or Axel Tuanzebe? Hard to say – at least as difficult to answer as recalling the last time any of Liverpool’s key performers missed a significant period with injury.
Today, Chris Smalling will make his 19th start on loan at Roma, where he has been part of seven clean sheets, only one fewer than he achieved in 34 starts for United last season. Romelu Lukaku has 18 goals for Inter Milan. He scored 15 in 45 games for United last season. Releasing both last summer were difficult decisions and, in the space left behind, Solskjaer could argue that Mason Greenwood and Brandon Williams have been given room to develop. What is beyond doubt is that Smalling and Lukaku are playing better under other managers, at other clubs. It is much more difficult to name the players who have improved at United.
Perhaps Ashley Young saw it that way too, as he became the third United player of recent times to embark for Inter Milan this week. The decision on Young’s contract extension was left so long that the player decided he would wait no more and then when finally the offer from United came amid a January injury glut it was too late. Nemanja Matic was told he could leave in this window and then the move was blocked. Bruno Fernandes may arrive from Sporting Lisbon this month, but that was never the original plan.
All clubs, all managers, are obliged to try to plot a future that can change with the tear of a muscle, or a referee’s decision. That United have got so little of it right means each blow is accompanied by a disproportionately severe effect. The departure of a player of the vintage of Young, 34, would ordinarily have been mapped on the planning document of a technical director for years in advance.
It should not have ended in the chaos of offer and last-minute counteroffer, as a good club captain was obliged to force the issue.
Of course, United still do not have a technical director. Presumably on account of them being right and all those clubs who do have that role, including Liverpool, Manchester City,
Barcelona, Juventus and Bayern Munich, being wrong.
On the scale of calamity – the shocking injury backlog, the unbalanced squad – it is noted that the injured Paul Pogba was at Paris fashion week on Friday. Plotting the engagements of Pogba’s social diary – family weddings, charity football matches, commercial tours used as platforms to outline future career plans – against United’s sliding fortunes is, admittedly, an inexact science. Much simpler to say that Pogba appears to do whatever he wants, which tells you all you need to know about the kind of control that United assert over their highestpaid employee.
Additionally, for those who might have forgotten, United still pay Alexis Sanchez around £175,000 a week not to play for them – or indeed Inter, where he is injured. An astonishing turn of events, made even more remarkable by the fact that his unfortunate situation is not even in United’s top 10 of problems.
By the same token, Solskjaer was unable to convince free-scoring teenage striker Erling Haaland to sign for him despite the notinconspicuous advantage of being the most famous player to emerge from the 19-year-old’s native Norway, his former coach and a friend of his father. It makes you wonder if young Erling had drawn his own conclusions from events at Old Trafford. The same might be said for Tahith Chong and Angel Gomes, both out of contract in the summer.
This is United in 2020, a string of emergencies each requiring an unsatisfactory solution that sends their manager stumbling on to the next challenge, which happens to be Anfield today.
There remains a small chance that United might pull off a historic upset, as they often did against a much more successful Liverpool in the 1980s. The caveat is that it will be in spite of what they have become in recent years rather than because of what they are.
It is beyond doubt that Smalling and Lukaku are playing better under other managers