This is the one, Ole. Get past PSG and job is yours

OLd Trafford being where music died in 1992, they still like a bit of Stone Roses before kickoff. This Is The One greets the team when they walk out. At home to Crystal Palace in the middle of November, it probably isn’t. But tonight it is. For Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Thomas Tuchel, this really is the one.

For Solskjaer, it is the next stage of the audition, a recall as actors have it. We have seen he can motivate, he can play the Manchester United way, he can do it against the best in the Premier League; but what about the elite of Europe?

Under even greater scrutiny, however, is Tuchel at Paris SaintGermain. He is walking away with Ligue 1 — 10 points clear and two games in hand — but that is to be expected.

Like Manchester City’s owners, what PSG crave is supremacy in the Champions League.

The club has not progressed past the quarter-finals in the modern, 32- team format, or beyond the semi- finals since 1994-95. Winning the league is not enough at PSG any more. If Tuchel loses in the last 16, he may not make it beyond the end of the season.

To some extent, Solskjaer has won already, just by allowing Old Trafford to feel good about this tie. When the draw was made, Manchester United were a punchline — the Premier League team all of Europe would have wanted to play. No more. Solskjaer has transformed the club, realised the potential of his squad, so that signings such as Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial now play their purchase price and Marcus Rashford plays like he’s wearing an England shirt.

He is not so much the people’s choice to be the next United manager, as the obvious one. He

still needs this, though, to be wholly secure. If United lost, certainly if they were defeated emphatically over two legs, it would raise the first questions about the gravitas of Solskjaer’s regime — about whether he has more than a feelgood factor.

PSG are good, we know this, but they couldn’t beat Napoli home or away in the group stage and lost to Liverpool at Anfield. And that was with their full team. They are without Neymar and edinson Cavani tonight and maybe Marco Verratti, too.

There will rarely be a better time to play them even if Solskjaer is correct in saying this creates an element of the unknown.

Will that be mitigation for Tuchel, then? Probably not. Like Pep Guardiola at City, there is no list of injuries so great it will elicit sympathy.

PSG are presumed to have every advantage going already. Tuchel is expected to rise above misfortune. ‘Immerse me in your splendour,’ as the roses sang.

So this is the one. If Solskjaer wins tonight, if he progresses across the two legs, if he takes Manchester United into the Champions League’s final eight, his position will be increasingly irresistible, if it is not already.

Strangely, Manchester United’s caretaker has less at stake than Tuchel, in victory or defeat.