When the comedian Frank Skinner put on a show last week at the Lowry theatre, just across the Manchester ship canal from Old Trafford, he got talking to a guy in the front row about his tattoos.
The man had Sir Alex Ferguson inked into his arm and it was there, he explained, as a symbol of his enduring love for Manchester United.
“You haven’t got one for Erik ten Hag yet?” Skinner inquired, with a tone that indicated he, a long-suffering West Bromwich Albion fan, knew how hurtful football could be. “Yeah, probably best to hold off on that one. Wait and see how it goes…”
It was a nice line. The audience had a laugh at United’s expense. And, humour aside, it was probably decent advice, two years into Ten Hag’s reign, now we have reached the point when the FA Cup final against Manchester City this weekend could conceivably be his last assignment.
The man himself says not. Ten Hag has been asked about his position on a number of occasions and each time he has repeated that he is the best man for the job and sure, absolutely sure, the good times will come back.
We have, however, been here before. In 2016, Louis van Gaal led United to an FA Cup final amid escalating reports that his job was in danger. What he never realised was that the decision had already been made. And if you have seen his wife, Truus, being interviewed in the 2022 documentary film Van Gaal, you will understand how brutal it can be when a football club decides you have run out of time.
“I knew Louis would be fired by Manchester United,” Truus explains to the Dutch director Geertjan Lassche. “I felt it. We had a small boardroom there (at Old Trafford) and it was always fun with the old Manchester legends. Alex Ferguson, Bobby Charlton… we had a table there with good food and drinks. Then, suddenly, they stopped greeting us and just waved from afar. Something was wrong; it was female intuition.”
Van Gaal had taken United to fifth in the Premier League. It was a place down from the previous season, meaning no Champions League qualification, and that immediately made his position vulnerable.
Yet he was so assured of his own self-worth, as a Champions League winner with Ajax and Barcelona, he refused to believe it. Ed Woodward, then United’s chief executive, had told him there was nothing to worry about.
“When the man (Woodward) denies it, Louis accepts that,” says Truus, whose female intuition was getting stronger all the time. “I said, ‘Louis, you’re going to be fired. Get wise to it.’”
United won 2-1 against Crystal Palace. It was their first trophy of the post-Ferguson era and the team went back to the Landmark hotel in Marylebone for a party. But the story was out about Jose Mourinho taking over as manager. It had been leaked to the media before the game and, when Truus broke the news to her husband, it led to an argument.
Louis van Gaal with the FA Cup after beating Crystal Palace at Wembley (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
“Why do you have to spoil my party?” Van Gaal wanted to know. “Stop all this negative nonsense.”
The saddest memory, perhaps, is that Van Gaal brought the trophy into the post-match news conference, walking in with a broad smile when almost everyone in the room knew he was a goner. Truus skipped the hotel party. So did the United directors. And that, more than anything, made the manager suspicious. Why, he found himself wondering, did they not want to be part of the celebrations?
“His voice sounded broken,” says Truus, recalling their telephone conversation the next day. “‘Hi, it’s Louis, you can come home. You were right.’ When I came home, I could see he’d been crying. I hugged him. I had tears in my eyes, too.”
Eight years on, it is not a story that reflects particularly well on Woodward, or any of the other people at Old Trafford who had been let into the secret. But it is also not a story that will shock people at the sharpest end of the business.
A lot of plotting does go on behind a manager’s back, especially when a big team with big expectations is under-performing. In Ten Hag’s case, the lesson of history is that he should be realistic about the dangers of his industry rather than making the same mistake as Van Gaal.
David Moyes, who lasted 10 months as “the Chosen One” to replace Ferguson, would say the same. He, too, did not see the sack coming. Moyes found out via newspaper headlines, in a similar way to Van Gaal hearing from the people he described as “my friends in the media”. Neither man has ever forgiven Woodward.
And Ten Hag? Well, let’s see what happens. Woodward is no longer involved and Ten Hag insists he has a good working relationship with the people at Old Trafford who make these decisions.
Is he preparing for next season, he was asked yesterday? “Yeah, of course.”
By now, however, it is an open secret that Sir Jim Ratcliffe, operating under the Glazer family with control of United’s sporting operations, is giving serious consideration to bringing down the guillotine. It has been United’s worst-ever finish, eighth, of the Premier League era. For that alone, Ten Hag must realise he is in trouble, particularly when United’s opponents at Wembley have just wrapped up their fourth title in a row. That the word coming out of Old Trafford is no decision has yet been made on the manager’s future is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Dutchman.
Would winning save him? It would certainly help. But then again, Van Gaal must have thought the same eight years ago.
Juan Mata tells the story in his autobiography, Suddenly a Footballer, about the trophy presentation in 2016 and, knowing the pressure Van Gaal had been under, how “a feeling came over me to do something from the heart.”
“We were all passing the trophy around and I realised it wouldn’t get to him (Van Gaal) unless somebody gave it him,” Mata recalls. “David (de Gea) and I went over to him and handed him the trophy.
“We all knew what he had been through, the criticism he had been subjected to and the numbers of times he seemed to be getting kicked out of the club. You could feel how much it meant to him to lift that trophy. You could see the emotion in his face.”
Juan Mata (left) had sympathy for Louis van Gaal (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Unfortunately for Van Gaal, there were other times when it was painfully obvious that he, like Ten Hag now, did not have everyone’s trust in the dressing room.
There were all sorts of well-sourced stories about players disliking Van Gaal’s tactics, his almost schoolmasterly approach and some of his more unorthodox rules, such as insisting the forwards had to take a touch, rather than shooting first time, if a cross came into the penalty area.
Trying to adhere to these rules in a home game against Tottenham Hotspur, Wayne Rooney stopped to control a right-wing delivery from Antonio Valencia in a position in which the striker would ordinarily be expected to shoot. Kyle Walker, the nearest defender, was so surprised he knocked the ball into the net for an own goal. Watch the replays and you can see Rooney laughing on the way back to the centre circle.
He wasn’t hugely amused, though, and nor was he happy when he was left out of a Boxing Day fixture at Stoke City. The following week, Rooney went to the manager’s office to tell him that, having been dropped while trying to play Van Gaal’s way, he was going back to what he knew best. Rooney returned to the team and went on a scoring burst of seven goals in eight games.
Then there was the story of Van Gaal’s “evaluation sessions,” on the day after every match, when this giant bear of a manager could be so unsparing in his criticisms. Rooney and Michael Carrick, as the two most senior players, went to see him to explain it was damaging for morale.
From that point onwards, Van Gaal restricted himself to sending the players individual emails to make his point, sometimes including video clips to highlight what they had done well and not so well.
A lot of the players ignored the emails or redirected them straight to their trash. Van Gaal suspected as much and had a tracker fitted so he could check if the emails were opened and for how long. It became a game of cat and mouse. Some players opened the emails on their mobiles, then left their phones on the side for 20 minutes.
United finished with 66 points in Van Gaal’s final season, having attained 70 in his first year. Yet the biggest complaint was the prosaic style of play that meant United managed only one more goal than a Sunderland team that finished fourth from bottom after spending 237 days in the relegation zone.
Wayne Rooney celebrates after Kyle Walker puts into his own net in 2015 (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Ten Hag’s United, in comparison, accumulated 75 points to finish third in his first season at Old Trafford.
This season, however, United have ended up with 60 points as well as the ignominy of a negative goal difference and a 31-point gap to City, the champions, compared to 14 the year previously.
The drop-off has been considerable and, though Ten Hag continues to defend his record, it is hard to sound convincing when your team has faced more shots than the Derby County side that finished 2007-08 with 11 points as the worst team in Premier League history.
“I have nothing to say,” said Ten Hag, to questions about whether this might be his last game. “I am just focusing on the job I have to do and that is, first, to win the game and keep going in the project.”
Fair enough. Ten Hag spoke about planning for next season as if everything else was just media fantasy. But so did Van Gaal when he was in this position. The sense of deja vu is undeniable and, unfortunately for United’s manager, there is every chance he might have misjudged it, too.
(Top photos: Getty Images)
Read the full article here