Erik ten Hag’s job remains up in the air and reports suggest the Manchester United dressing room fears its manager has resigned himself to the sack at the end of the season.
It doesn’t bode well if Ten Hag has already thrown in the towel because there’s still a lot to play for this season. United may be out of the race for a Champions League qualification spot, although we’re still in the hunt for FA Cup glory.
Another trophy is exactly what Ten Hag needs.
According to The Sun, several players feel Ten Hag has now resigned himself to the sack at the end of the season after noticing a change in the demeanour of the Dutch boss.
Neil Custis, who wrote the article, claims: “Players have spotted Ten Hag’s change of mood, suggesting he knows the axe will fall.”
Their performances would paint a different picture because the results may be bad, but I don’t think the players have given up on Ten Hag.
United are currently sixth in the Premier League table ahead of Saturday’s trip to Bournemouth. We are 11 points off fourth spot after a run of only one win in six games. If only we had beaten Brentford and Chelsea from those winning positions…
United would be crazy to sack Ten Hag
Who else is there? The report also claims former Brighton and Chelsea manager Graham Potter is in line to take over after meeting with Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Are we going to ignore the fact Ten Hag’s massively overachieved in its first season after a season that has been a write-off due to injuries?
Furthermore, United need some sort of stability throughout all of this change Ineos are planning. Potter doesn’t excite and Ten Hag deserves at least one more summer to get things right, especially with a proper football structure being built around him.
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Ten Hag did a good job holding the team together despite the enormous challenges in the past year. Ineos did not express support through media of their support for him so it’s a given that he’s managing his last games. I think that’s a mistake as the team still had a fair chance to qualify for the Euros before the news/rumors went out months ago when Ineos came in. They likely started those rumors and even if they didn’t, there wasn’t any official attempt to stop it and stand behind the manager. ManUtd will regret this for years.
how on earth can you say it would be crazy to sack ETH? feels like trolling at this point.
mourinho got fired for being utterly dominated by liverpool, i think it was 34 shots – and was fired and deservedly so.
under ETH we concede 20-30 shots per game and this is acceptable? the game after brentford had 31 shots against united, brighton restricted brentford to 5 shots – if you think that it’s a player problem and not a coaching/tactical one then I really don’t know what business you have writing about football.
mental how fans are backing ETH. he will be fired and just watch where he goes next – it wont be to bayern/barca – which tells you all you need to know. Eredivisie is this awful managers level.
If ETH can be considered to massively have over-achieved last season, it’s got to be accepted that that’s been followed by massive under-achievement this.
And, at the risk of repeating myself, this isn’t solely down to injuries. If ETH was capable of setting up an efficient way of playing, we’d still be dropping more points than if injury-free, but we wouldn’t have teams walking all over us: shooting at will. We’d at least be showing fight against the Brentfords of this world.
That this is happening is down to ETH and a bunch of new players won’t solve that. Doesn’t matter how good they are, if they literally don’t know what they’re doing when they cross that white line, next season will be just as bad. Worse, in fact, as ETH will go after a few weeks and we’ll be scrambling around trying to find a good manager in September, October, or whatever.
Time to say ‘thanks for trying: goodbye’.