Solskjaer’s a bold choice, but it will only work if United start worrying more about results than money

THE people who say that the appointment of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as Manchester United’s fulltime manager is a gamble are right. Of course it’s a gamble. Every managerial appointment is a gamble. Pep Guardiola was a gamble when Barcelona plucked him f rom Barcelona B. The same with Zinedine Zidane when he was given the top job at the Bernabeu the first time around.

There i s no such thing as a certainty in football management. Certainty was why United went for Jose Mourinho. He was supposed to come with a cast-iron guarantee and look what a disaster that turned into. To a lesser extent, the same applied to Louis van Gaal, who came with an admirable track record of achievement in t he game and departed Old Trafford humiliated and unlamented.

So let’s not patronise Solskjaer too much and trot out all the old lines about his baby face and his lack of experience and the fact that he was only managing in Norway when United turned to him in desperation late last year after Mourinho had torn the club apart.

United tried blue- chip and got chewed up and spat out. They hired on reputation, only to discover they had been saddled with managers who looked as if they were past their sell-by date. In Mourinho’s case, he gave every impression of hating the job and everything and everyone connected with it.

It would have been hard to argue with United’s executive vicechairman, Ed Woodward, if he had managed to extricate Mauricio Pochettino from the iron grip of Daniel Levy at Spurs and made him

Mourinho’s full- time successor because it is clear from his work at Tottenham, the way he has got his teams to play, that Pochettino is a great talent and a dynamic force.

But Pochettino would have been a gamble, too. He has never been involved with a club the size of United, either as a player or a manager, and even though he gives every appearance of being ready for the step up, maybe he would have struggled to cope with the weight of expectation.

That can happen. Look at how it picked apart David Moyes. Lest we forget, Moyes was seen as ripe for a big job, too, when at Everton. It did not take long for that to unravel. Pochettino is lionised at Spurs even though he has not won trophies. That would not happen at United, where life is very different.

Success in management is often a curious cocktail of timing, personality, background and dumb luck and even though it is hard to deny Solskjaer gained an initial bounce at United simply by not being Mourinho and feeding off the relief his departure brought, it’s clear there’s much more to him than that.

If the season had started when Solskjaer took over in December, United would be top of the table now. Maybe that is an empty statistic but it hints at the transformation Solskjaer has wrought. He has started to get the best out of United’s two most talented outfield players, Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial, and he has reminded us Romelu Lukaku deserves much better than to be mocked for a leaden touch. Because of his history at the club, Solskjaer is comfortable at United. The c l u b d o e s n ’ t intimidate him. He does not fear it. He is

not dwarfed by i t . The opposite, actually: it makes him grow. He knows how it works and he knows what it takes to win the biggest honours in the game there. He knows how to make great players play.

He has breathed belief i nto players who had been shorn of it and, in the most important match of his tenure so far, the second leg of the Champions League tie with PSG, he showed that his belief and his faith in youth is inviolable by trusting United’s young players when the stakes were at their highest.

He and his assistants, Mike Phelan and Michael Carrick, have achieved an awful lot in a very short space of time. Solskjaer has achieved so much, in fact, that it would have been perverse if Woodward had not given him the job. Now he has to back him in the transfer market.

Those pointing out that Solskjaer’s United are hardly the free-flowing attacking machine they were under Sir Alex Ferguson are also correct. But give him a chance. Solskjaer has not got the players for that. Not yet. Their recruitment has been so poor and so disjointed in recent years that the team Solskjaer inherited from Mourinho has to play on the counter-attack to have a chance of getting results.

He knows there has to be a reckoning now. Too many of the first team are not good enough. Not if United are to challenge for the top honours again.

United have spent a lot of money in the past couple of years but they have wasted a lot of it. Now they have to spend again. They have to strengthen central defence and fill the leadership void in central midfield. There is still a chasm in the quality of their squad compared with Liverpool and Manchester City.

Most of all, Solskjaer needs help from above. Too often since the departure of former chief executive David Gill, United have been played for suckers in the transfer market. They have missed some of the biggest targets. They have been sold too many duds.

Woodward is a financial mastermind but he has too often been exposed in his football dealings. If the Glazers cared as much about football results as they do about financial results, Woodward would have been shown the door by now. However it happens, perhaps with a director of football, the club’s structure needs to change.

It is to Woodward’s credit that he has handed the reins to Solskjaer. It is a bold choice. It is a risk. It is a gamble. But if Solskjaer is given the backing he needs, there is no reason why it should not pay off handsomely.