Published: 18:01 EDT, 28 October 2024 | Updated: 18:01 EDT, 28 October 2024
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Few things in football land with such a bang as the sacking of a Manchester United manager. That's five in a little over eleven years now. Erik ten Hag lasted longer than some of them but arguably he achieved rather less.
What's more, Ten Hag leaves barely a footprint in his wake. Not on the touchline, nor the coaching field. How strange.
Who really was he? More to the point, what was he and what was his team actually meant to be?
After two and a half years and 127 games, we don't really know and a football coach without an identity and without a recognisable pattern to his team's football is not really a coach at all. As such Ten Hag's failings were of the most very basic kind.
I clashed twice with Ten Hag in press conference situations over the course of the last six months. Once after his United team beat Manchester City in last May's FA Cup Final and again after Liverpool had disrobed them at Old Trafford at the start of this season.
Erik ten Hag lasted longer than some of them but arguably he achieved rather less
Ten Hag was not a particularly sophisticated orator. His relatively rudimentary grasp of English didn't help him. But he is, by all accounts, just like that in his native language too.
At times he needed his team's football to speak for him and on far too many occasions it simply did not make the necessary sense.
The truth is that the only repeat patterns of Ten Hag's reign were ones appertaining to self-harm. Rarely has a United team appeared so feckless in possession, so easy to play against and so prone to turning the ball over in the very worst areas.
On Match of the Day recently, former Brighton striker Glenn Murray said that teams play United these days knowing they will be granted one of football's most precious commodities, time to play. Brighton, it is worth noting, beat Ten Hag's version of United four times in five league meetings.
Indeed what was so notable about the tactical excellence of United's Cup Final victory was just how astonishingly rare it was. The discipline and clear order of United's football as they downed City 2-1 at Wembley was so alien to what Ten Hag's teams served up over his time at the club as to be quite shocking.
Ten Hag sought to portray that performance as a sign of progress but the truth is that it an was outlier display, one to set against all the dreadful and directionless others that had contributed to an eight place Premier League finish and a negative season goal difference that will now rest in United folklore for as long as it takes for everybody to forget about it.
At Wembley, sitting in that vast but somehow airless auditorium that has witness joy and deep sadness in equal measure, Ten Hag told me I didn't understand football. At Old Trafford after the Liverpool game he said that he felt sorry for me.
I clashed twice with Ten Hag in press conference situations over the course of the last six months including after Liverpool had disrobed them at Old Trafford at the start of this season
He doubtless didn't mean it personally and these things are never taken that way.
There was, at least, passion to found in Ten Hag's defence of his players and his record but equally there were too few signs of a cogent argument. Ten Hag, truth be to be told, was far too often a coach with holes in his team and holes in his argument. He was unconvincing to the end.
Bad players didn't help him. They rarely do. And this will be a problem that will be lurking round corners at Old Trafford for whoever replaces Ten Hag in the long term.
Old Trafford has for too long been a place where good players go to die and poor ones go to hide and earn well. United have been buying inadequate footballers for so long now it's frightening.
A new look football department assembled by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Dave Brailsford under their INEOS umbrella was supposed to fix that but unless there is some improvement in weeks to come, the 2024 summer influx of Manuel Ugarte, Joshua Zirkzee and Matthijs de Ligt will be filed in that bulging folder already holding the paperwork relating to prior failures like Memphis Depay, Morgan Schneiderlin, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Dan James and Donny van de Beek.
Nobody at Old Trafford will miss the presence and influence of the SEG agency that represents Ten Hag and a number of players brought to the club on his watch.
Equally, this is a default pattern of inadequate recruitment that simply must change if United are ever to be jolted from his cycle of self-harm.
United have tried just about every kind of manager since Ferguson stood down at the end of their last title season in 2013. One for the long term (David Moyes), a sophisticate (Louis van Gaal), some shock and awe (Jose Mourinho), one of their own (Ole Gunnar Solskjaer) and, in Ten Hag, one of Europe's most up and coming.
Unless there is some improvement in weeks to come, the 2024 summer influx including Manuel Ugarte will be filed in that folder holding the paperwork relating to prior failures
Ten Hag seemingly arrived without the tool kit he had used in building an impressive team at Ajax, though. United simply didn't get what they thought they were getting. Most of us cottoned on to it midway through last season. INEOS, deep down, knew it too but couldn't find an upgrade back in those strange days of early summer.
Ten Hag walks out of the door chuntering about injustice and a journey cut short. He continues to wear that FA Cup win and the Carabao Cup success of the year before like two badges of honour.
But those boasts of silverware always rang desperately hollow. Ten Hag takes his leave quietly and meekly, a metaphor for his team's puzzling football.