The Ole effect is bringing fresh belief to Old Trafford

THE people who say that the appointment of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as Manchester United’s full-time manager is a gamble are right. Every managerial appointment is a gamble.

Pep Guardiola was a gamble when Barcelona plucked him from Barcelona B. The same with Zinedine Zidane when he was given the top job at Real Madrid the first time around.

There is 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 the game and departed Old Trafford humiliated and unlamented.

So let’s not patronise Solskjaer and trot out all the old lines about his baby face, 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 vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, if he had managed to extricate Mauricio Pochettino from Daniel Levy’s grip at Spurs and made him Mourinho’s full-time successor because it is clear from the way he has his teams play, that the Argentinian is a great talent, a dynamic force.

But Pochettino would have been a gamble, too. He has never been involved with a club the size of United. Even though he gives the 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, who 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.

Success in management is often a curious cocktail of timing, personality, background and dumb luck.

Although 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. That hints at the transformation Solskjaer has brought.

Because of his history at the club, Solskjaer is comfortable at United. The club doesn’t intimidate him. He isn’t dwarfed by it. The opposite, actually: It makes him grow. He knows how it works and what it takes to win the biggest honours in the game there.

He has breathed belief into players who had been shorn of it and, in the most important match of his tenure so far, the Champions League second-leg tie with Paris Saint-Germain, he showed that his belief and 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 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. Their recruitment has been so poor and so disjointed in recent years that the team he 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.

United have spent a lot of money in the past couple of years but they have wasted a lot of it. Now they must spend again.

They must strengthen central defence and in midfield. There is still a chasm in the quality of their squad compared with Liverpool and Manchester City.

But Solskjaer needs help from above. Too often, United have been played for suckers in the transfer market, missing some of the biggest targets. They have been sold too many duds.

Woodward is a financial mastermind but he has frequently been exposed in his football dealings. If the Glazers cared as much about football results as they do about financial results, he would have been shown the door by now.

It is to Woodward’s credit that he has handed the reins to Solskjaer. It is a bold choice but a gamble.

However, if Solskjaer is given the backing he needs, it could pay off handsomely.