Colin Sheridan: Another fine mess as Cup win just a parting gift for Ten Hag

The Dutch boss will be fine whatever happens at Old Trafford. 

Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag lifts the FA Cup Trophy. Pic: John Walton/PA Wire.

“When I took over,” Erik ten Hag told reporters on Saturday evening “it was a mess.”  The “it” he was referring to was apparently Manchester United, not his garden shed. “We are exactly where we want to be.” 

To be fair to the Dutchman, if he was ever going to be forgiven some good, old-fashioned delusion, it was after winning the FA Cup final, which he just had, his young side beating a disinterested Manchester City. It is likely to be his last game for the club. As if to reinforce that point, the club's minority owner Jim Ratcliffe chose to strategically avoid naming Ten Hag, sounding instead like an AI Chatbot trying to express human emotion; “It is a glorious feeling to win the FA Cup final at Wembley,” the Ineos magnate said. “Manchester United clearly were not the favourites to win today but they played with total commitment and skill and overcame one of the great teams in football. We are all very proud of the players and the staff who work tirelessly to support them.” The whole affair was the most Manchester United episode imaginable. Distant second-favourites to win a two-horse race against their cross-city rivals, upsetting the odds in that context should’ve had a season-defining quality to it. Instead, it felt like a slapstick bookend to a Benny Hill season, like the team had become so disastrously unpredictable, it couldn’t even lose when it was fully expected to. You could imagine Ratcliffe entering the gaffer's office on Friday like Ving Rhames visiting Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, giving him instructions for the Big Fight (“In the fifth, your ass goes down”), only for Willis’s character to ignore it with rather spectacular consequences. There will be no such dramas between Ratcliffe and Ten Hag, you’d imagine, but you’d also guess the Ineos billionaire's life would be a little simpler this Monday morning had United played well, but lost. Winning won’t save Ten Hag’s bacon, it’ll likely just slow down its inevitable entry into the proverbial slicer.