As a fan of Manchester United I have grown accustom to winning trophies and an expectation of a good run in the champions league every season. Over the last six years the toxic nature of the club has slowly but surely started to lower my expectations for a club of the stature of Manchester United. It is the 3rd of December and I have had another lacklustre performance against newly promoted Aston Villa, a team that United in their worst season in thirty years still should be beating comprehensibly.
However this was not the case as we continue to be played off the park by relegation contenders with our terrible losing mentality and appalling tactics week after week. The winning instinct that was present for years under Fergie is nowhere to be seen. As Manchester United fans we have begun to accept mediocrity in the teams we play every week. Players of the like of Jesse Lingard and Juan Mata have no place in a team which is meant to be challenging for titles. However a club which was run ruthlessly by Fergie has turned into one which rewards sentimentality and washed up academy graduates because “they know what it means to play for a club like United”
In the premier league this season there has been numerous example of clubs ‘playing for the badge’ of their club and over performing. Sheffield United sit 7th in the league after continuously grinding out results against the big clubs of England. Leicester are eight points of the league leaders Liverpool in 2nd, these clubs are not better than Manchester United. They will not qualify for Europe every year, they do not attract world class talent like United do. However they have a hunger to win every game and do the fans proud something Ole Gunnar Solskjaer cannot emulate. We all enjoyed the honeymoon period of Solsjaer’s appointment as caretaker manager and the club bought into it and they should never have offered him the job permanently.
This is an embodiment of how far our standards have slipped as fans that we celebrate a manager who was sacked for getting Cardiff relegated from the premier league and had a stint managing a Norwegian club. Yet the club fully support his ‘vision’ for the future at the expense of being terrible now. I have no problem with being patient with a manager if I can see the foundations of a team being built, Klopp had an adjustment period when he first went to Liverpool, but when we are meant to support a tactically inept manager who consistently gets found out against mid table teams I cannot stand by and talk about the future.
As Manchester United fans we have had to endure some appalling losses and draws this year in our worst start to a season in thirty years. The lack of passion and fight to win games is present every week no matter the opposition. I fear that Ole will still be manager come next year and we will miss out on top managers like Mauricio Pochettino and Brendan Rogers, and we will have to enjoy another year of stale tactics and boring football.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is legend of the club, he won us the treble 20 years ago. He is a legend for being a great player not a tactical mastermind of a manager and that is what we must see him as now, a manager who is leading this club to one of its worst seasons ever.
Scoreboard Blog 