Erik ten Hag might have two games to save his Man United career, says Laurie Whitwell | OneFootball

Erik ten Hag might just have two more games to save his job at Manchester United.

This is according to reliable journalist Laurie Whitwell of The Athletic, who believes that part-owners Ineos are not quite at breaking point yet, despite one of the shameful displays in the club’s history against Spurs yesterday.

United recorded their worst expected goals against statistic in Premier League history and in truth it was as bad when they had 11 men on the pitch as after captain Bruno Fernandes got sent off.

No longer having last season’s excuse of an injury crisis, manager Erik ten Hag has simply called for patience while his new signings bed into the team.

“Privately, those in charge are echoing Ten Hag’s sentiments — that altering the infrastructure and working practices at the club was the main priority when INEOS arrived and patience is required to allow that to bed in and see results,” Whitwell says.

“Berrada and Ashworth only went public unequivocally backing Ten Hag at the start of this month, so changing course now would be a volte-face and out of keeping for executives who like to be driven by a methodical process.”

In other words, we don’t want to look stupid and we don’t want to be hasty. Yet surely Ineos have been working on this contingency ever since they took over football operations at the club?

Whitwell says that “the pressure is sure to build on the decision-makers, however, should Porto and Sunday’s trip to Aston Villa provide more of the same, especially as another international break is looming.”

Frankly, fans will be wondering what the point is of waiting two more games and losing more ground when it seems like only a miracle will rescue Ten Hag from the inevitable. Even if United were to get six points from those two games, most United fans have come to expect that the next match, or the one after that, will see Jekyll turn to Hyde again. And by that point, more ground will have been lost and another season will be written off.

A managerial performance that is widely regarded as one of the worst in living memory was former United star Gary Neville’s ill-fated spell in charge of La Liga side, Valencia. An eagle-eyed x user posted a chilling stat after yesterday’s game, showing that in Ten Hag’s last 28 games at United his record has been worse than that of Neville in his 28 games at Valencia.

It is hard to fathom how Ten Hag, whose Ajax sides were almost unbeatable and whose first season at United was full of promise, could turn out to be so incompetent.

Over the years there have been managers who are superb at building momentum when their team is winning, but do not have the right psychology to pull a team up that has lost its way.

Whitwell notes that after yesterday’s debacle, Ten Hag told his players there is “always a new day”. If that is the best he can muster, then it is hardly surprising that United are mentality mice.

When the Dutchman first joined United, there were many articles and interviews about his meticulousness, how he would measure the blades of grass on the training pitch with a ruler to make sure they exactly matched the length of the Old Trafford pitch, how player diets were controlled down to the last calorie and so forth.

This is the man who made his team run the number of metres they had been outrun by Brentford to teach them about commitment. Now, after an even worse performance than that 4-0 drubbing, he simply tells them there will always be another day.

Ineos need to be patient and methodological, we would not want them any other way. But there is a fine line between patient and paralysed and between methodical and myopic.

Featured image Carl Recine via Getty Images

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