End is nigh for wet Ten Hag as United sink to a new low
Dutchman, once the future at Old Trafford, looks as if the putrefaction at the club has finally engulfed his tenure
It took an evening deluge to throw Manchester United’s malaise into the sharpest relief. The Old Trafford roof leaked with such violence that fans in the South Stand were left watching a veritable waterfall.
Ethan Wheatley and Omari Forson, two academy products promoted to the bench, forlornly chased a lost cause against an errorstrewn Arsenal side who should have been ripe for the kill. And in the midst of this soggy scene stood Erik ten Hag in a drenched pale suit, barking instructions to nobody in particular, knowing that a record-extending 14th defeat of this Premier League season all but condemned him to a summer sacking. Rarely had the mood here felt so fatalistic.
Even Ten Hag’s choice of suit carried a certain pathos. It was identical to the beige number he had worn to his United unveiling in 2022, when he boldly declared that he could break the Liverpool-manchester City duopoly.
On that occasion, those sceptical of his abilities mischievously dubbed him “Erik ten Months”. So far he has lasted 24, but the appetite for any more of the shapeless torpor he has overseen is dwindling fast.
At a personal level, it is mortifying for the Dutchman. He entered this job radiating optimism, proclaiming his ambition to restore United to their rightful spot at the summit. He threatens to end it in a state of helplessness, reduced to deploying Casemiro as a makeshift centre-back, only to witness the Brazilian commit a second unforgivable error in six days. The player’s trajectory from five-time Champions League winner to lame carthorse mirrors the manager’s own downward spiral. Ten Hag was the future once. Now, finally, the putrefaction at United has engulfed him.
This was quite the day for Sir Jim Ratcliffe to have hosted his “Wembley of the North” talks with Sir Keir Starmer. There is nothing like discussing a Trafford Park regeneration with the probable next prime minister while the full horror of your stadium’s deterioration plays out in front of you. Few could dispute the logic of the project, with United supporters liable to receive more of a soaking under the ramshackle old roof than from the springtime downpours. But he needed no clearer signal than this match to realise that an Ineos-led makeover would require far more than a remodelling of Old Trafford.
In the 11 years since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, had there even been a United line-up as limited as this? Shorn of Bruno Fernandes and Marcus Rashford, they resembled lambs to the slaughter as Arsenal sought to sustain their quest for a first league title in 20 years. It did not pan out as such, with United avoiding the rank humiliation that many supporters had feared. This owed far more, though, to Arsenal’s profligacy.
A less tormented team would not have needed this many invitations to derail Mikel Arteta’s dreams. United’s finishing was woeful: no sooner had Alejandro Garnacho finally escaped the shackles of William Saliba than he sliced hopelessly wide, burying his head in his hands. You could detect a similar reaction from Roy Keane as United, the palest shadow of the sides he had captained, toiled in vain to summon a late salvo.
“The disappointment for me in the last half an hour was United,” Keane said. “Arsenal have come to Old Trafford over the years, but I bet they couldn’t believe how bad United were. Whatever bits of possession they had, look at the end product and the lack of quality. You talk about the great teams United have had over the years. But no decision-making, nobody digging anyone out, making mistakes, falling over, not putting demands on each other? That United team there… they’re so bad.”
Lest Keane’s comments be dismissed as a reflexive diatribe, the statistics support his anguish, with United under Ten Hag discovering fresh extremes of ineptitude. On 54 points, they are in danger of surpassing their lowest ever points tally, the 58 achieved under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer during the Norwegian’s wretched final campaign. Should they succumb to Newcastle on Wednesday night, they will reach a record number of home defeats in a single season, with 10. The 82 goals they have conceded in all competitions represents their most dismal return in 53 years. To cap it all, their goal difference in the league stands at minus four, a nadir not endured since the Tommy Docherty era in 1974. That year, they were relegated.
You wanted to see some stirring of life, a sense that United understood the necessity of a response after their 4-0 humbling at Crystal Palace. Amad Diallo did the most to provide it with his quicksilver movement, but the outlook beyond was bleak. United were too lumpen, too bereft of imagination, to pounce on Arsenal’s inadequacies. The very least any would-be champions should expect when they come here is a ferocious late surge, but it never materialised, with fans streaming for the exits before the final whistle blew.
The storm offered a reflection on United’s mood, as a pristine May afternoon dissolved in a puddle, with ominous thunderclaps overhead.
Ratcliffe insisted he did not underestimate the scale of the challenge when he bought into his childhood club last December. But surely, five months on, it was not too much to ask to see the odd green shoot of recovery? Instead, as the water cascaded down the stadium steps, he surveyed only the steady drip of decrepitude.
From this Friday, on Amazon Prime, we will be able to watch 99, a three-part documentary series about Manchester United’s treble. Everyone who was there seems to be involved, giving their memories of a hectic few days in May, 25 years ago. Except for one glaring absentee.
According to the show’s producer – a certain David Beckham – Roy Keane refused to participate because he prefers not to look back on a time that, due to his enforced absence from the Champions League final that was the culmination of the historic threesome, is shrouded in personal trauma.
Mind, you would have thought he would be used to that by now, given his job these days seems to consist of nothing but embracing misery. For almost every game on
He went as far as to say the Arsenal players could not believe how bad United were
Sky features the former United captain fuming about the current state of the club where he won so much. And here he was again, yesterday, obliged to analyse a critical moment at the business end of the Premier League season.
The disappointment for him was that United were only peripheral to it. And the further bad news was that the side who are still in contention, intent, as his colleague Peter Drury put it, on going all the way, are Arsenal. Yes, it is the very team, when he led United to victory after victory, that most raised his hackles, against whom he embarked on a one-man campaign of terror, who are in with a chance of lifting the title. And to rub salt in ever-widening mental wounds, the wretched news after spending the afternoon in the Sky studio at Old Trafford was that his old side did so little to stop the old enemy progressing.
He went as far as to say the Arsenal players could not believe how bad United were after the visitors had won 1-0 and that the home side repeatedly squandered possession.
Once again he was moved to hark back to the great United players of old and how the current side seemed a bunch of misfits who kept falling over and who failed to call each other out.
Not that it should come as a surprise. This United team have been dredging new depths all season. The Sky approach to a game in which the only plausible doubt was how many Arsenal would win by was to spend an hour before kick-off ratcheting up the jeopardy by heading back in time. For much of the build-up, the ever-excellent David
Jones did his best to present a narrative in which history was stacked against Arsenal: how many times did we hear how seldom they had won at Old Trafford? Though it has to be said, in all those past failures to secure three points at the ground, Arsenal were not facing a side as bad as Erik ten Hag’s.
To reinforce the message, Sky sent history out onto the pitch during the pre-match warm-ups, in the shape of two enormous figures from United’s past. Gary Neville and Wayne Rooney (in Rooney’s case an ever-more enormous figure of the past) analysed the current bunch of players even as they kicked a ball around a couple of yards away. It was a nice touch, a riposte to Ten Hag’s claim last week that the former United stalwarts criticising his approach know nothing about football.
What Neville does better than anyone else in broadcasting is to produce coherent, sharp and concise evaluation at a speed rather beyond some of United’s defenders. His analysis of the Arsenal goal was a model of its kind, immediately spotting Casemiro’s culpability. Keane, who had a little longer to prepare his words, was equally critical at half-time: “He’s not done the basics here,” he moaned, his voice sounding wearier by the second.
In the second half, there was less to report. Not even much in the way of United misery. Things got so dull that Drury gave a nod to the noise emanating from the Stretford End. Though he did not point out that the chant being sung solidly for a good 10 minutes was about George Best: history, it seems, is all they have at Old Trafford.
For Keane, meanwhile, his face greying faster than his beard, someone needs to give him a break soon. Maybe, as therapy, the BBC should have offered him a gig reporting on his old club’s women’s team lifting the FA Cup with a victory over Tottenham just as the game at Old Trafford began. After all, giving his views on Ella Toone, Rachel Williams and Lucia Garcia, showing the kind of qualities their male counterparts singularly lack, would surely cheer him up. Though knowing Keane, even their triumph would not enthuse. “Girls,” he would have said, “it’s Spurs.”*