Ole’s honeymoon over but Reds have found love again
Last December, this column described Manchester United’s appointment of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as “romantic hokum”.
This column, let it be said, is not averse to a bit of romantic hokum. In fact, sometimes this column wishes life was composed of a little bit more romantic hokum.
This column would not object, for instance, if its life was a little bit more like the movie La-La Land: if, say, while sitting in gridlocked traffic on the M50, harassed commuters were to suddenly emerge from their cars to perform a full-scale musical number on the Red Cow Roundabout.
But there’s a time and a place, as members of the Garda Traffic Corps might point out while taking names and licence-plate numbers.
It seemed to this column like the wasteland of post-Mourinho Old Trafford would be too toxic for Solskjaer’s elfin charms.
Things seemed too far gone to be turned around by folksy appeals to halcyon days, the hope that the club could somehow turn the clock back and freeze itself in that perfect moment — 1999 in Barcelona, the third minute of injury time — and no-one would ever have to hear of Jose Mourinho.
And yet, as the weeks passed and the smiles returned to the faces at United, this column damned its cynical old soul.
Love is all you need, remember, and Solskjaer swept them off their feet.
When he turned up for work on December 20, he gave chocolate bars to all the staff, repeating a gesture he used to carry out in his playing days.
Chocolates, attacking football, liberally sprinkled Fergie-isms in press conferences, moonlight and music and love and romance… United fans — every single one of them — fell head over heels. They never thought they could feel like this again.
It would be easy in the wake of Tuesday night’s humbling for the United faithful to feel like fools.
‘A reality check’ was how Solskjaer described how PSG unceremoniously woke United from its romantic fever dream, like a school clergyman disturbing a canoodling teenage couple.
It turns out, some of them might have thought, that the man of their dreams was just this guy who’d absconded from his job managing in the Norwegian first division.
The extraordinary swelling of pre-match optimism — that United had not only restored its credibility, but might actually now come swaggering into contention for Champions League glory — was punctured by the lacerating blade of Kylian Mbappé, a young man with a grip on the thrilling essence of the game’s greatest nights, that ability to showcase in the biggest moments the jaw-dropping, the otherworldly, that has been the preserve of only Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the modern era.
Marco Verratti toyed with United in midfield like a particularly cruel cat.
Marquinhos snuffed out Paul Pogba, leaving the United star’s critics to their suspicions that he remains a show-pony only suited to sideshows against the likes of Fulham and Bournemouth.
Injuries to Anthony Martial and Jesse Lingard scuppered United too, but to see how PSG pounced on Solskjaer’s decision to play Juan Mata on the right wing, leaving Ashley Young exposed to Angel Di Maria’s vengeful thrusts, was to further expose United’s heartfelt longings to the cold light of day.
Still, ‘tis better to have loved and lost, and all that.
United fans don’t get much sympathy for their post-Ferguson trials. They have in that time, after all, won the FA Cup, the League Cup and the Europa League, and finished second in the Premier League.
They have also spent over €550 million in net transfer fees and built up one of the biggest wage bills in world football.
The five-and-a-half years since Ferguson’s retirement had felt like joyless servitude.
United were like Romanov aristocrats, used to living high on the hog in their opulent palaces, forced to endure a
Siberian death march under the merciless whip-hand of a succession of angry Bolsheviks.
Things were so much better when Tsar Fergie ruled, they lamented, a time of culture, refinement, and wingers.
Ole: "It’s not going to be a season-defining one for us. It has to be one that we’re going to learn from." #MUFC #UCL pic.twitter.com/bp6FZojKLA
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) February 12, 2019
Comrade Jose was the last straw — they turned on him and left him for dead, until he was picked up by a passing camera crew from Russia Today.
For United fans, the first 11 games of the Solskjaer era felt like a release. And though they might now suspect the smooth-talking Norwegian is not all he’s cracked up to be, they don’t want to go back.
The give-it-to-Ole-now brigade may hold their tongues awhile as his battered United negotiate the rest of a trying month, but whatever course the club take next, they would do well to remember the heady whirl of Solskjaer’s smiling revolution.
Maybe United cannot be sustained on boxes of chocolates for the receptionists, treble-winner DVDs and the tactical premise that the Stretford End might ‘suck the ball in’.
But neither should its identity be left to the Glazercorp number-crunchers or any more self-serving, sour-faced, managerial blowhards.
After all, this column recognises, on this day of all days, that there’s a time and place for a little romance.
