Shapeless, demotivated, petulant… Ten Hag’s ghost ship drifts on

Another thumping home defeat highlights a weak club that did not know what it wanted in the summer, or lacked the nous to get what it wanted over the line

Mon, 30 Sep, 2024 - 16:25

Jonathan Wilson

Who did not think that, sooner or later, we’d be here again? At the end of last season, Jim Ratcliffe, Dave Brailsford and the rest of the Ineos leadership at Manchester United spoke to numerous potential candidates after the club finished eighth in the Premier League with a negative goal-difference. They decided they would, after all, keep Erik ten Hag on as manager. After that decision, who did not foresee a point in the near future when, after another run of poor results, they would be back in the same place as before, just several million pounds poorer having bought another load of Dutch and Dutch-adjacent players?

This is United and that means these problems are always complicated by the memory of Alex Ferguson, who endured some lean years before finally winning the league in his seventh season at the club. The instinct for fans is always to show patience. Nobody wants to be Pete Molyneux, the fan who held up a banner reading “Three years of excuses and it’s still crap … ta-ra Fergie” six months before the decisive 1990 FA Cup triumph that was a springboard to Ferguson’s success.