‘Much more of this and Manchester United could withdraw their contract offer and give the job to Ruud van Nistelrooy instead.’ But ‘much more of this’ did not come. Obviously.
Ru the day
Spare a thought for poor Chris Wheeler, who set his stall out on Ruud van Nistelrooy as Manchester United manager ludicrously quickly and has since been hoist by the petard of a) Ruud van Nistelrooy’s Manchester United playing against someone other than a massively rotated Leicester side at home in a cup game and b) the Daily Mail selfishly sending him to watch said games.
After that 5-2 thrashing of Leicester on October 30, he wrote: ‘Somewhere in Portugal, Ruben Amorim would have been following events at Old Trafford and praying Sporting Lisbon don’t delay him from becoming Manchester United manager a moment longer.’
Nine days, two inevitably rather less inspiring displays and more pertinently a rousing victory for their incoming manager later and ‘it was very different to the scenes that saw United’s new head coach Ruben Amorim swept out of the Estadio Jose Alvalade on a wave of emotion on Tuesday night after a barnstorming win over Manchester City in his penultimate game as Sporting Lisbon boss.’
Weird that an unconvincing 2-0 home win over PAOK did not generate much fanfare. Not sure Amorim particularly minded that ‘delay’ either. Maybe he really was ‘praying’ to be in charge of this game rather than a win over Manchester City.
‘This was another stodgy performance by United who started with £400million-worth of players against a PAOK team that only qualified for this stage of the competition after winning a play-off against Shamrock Rovers,’ Wheeler says now, stressing a need to not ‘get too carried away’.
It is an important reminder from a man whose reaction to Danny Ward conceding five goals barely a week ago was: ‘Much more of this and United could withdraw their contract offer and give the job to Ruud van Nistelrooy instead.’
Amorim will suddenly now ‘start his new job on Monday with the bar set low thanks to games like this one as United laboured to victory’. It’s almost as if beating Leicester 5-2 at home in a cup game meant very little at all.
After that victory, Wheeler suggested ‘Erik ten Hag will have been screaming at his TV and wondering just where some of these United players have been hiding all season’ after ‘a performance bursting with freedom and enterprise and enjoyment, the like we rarely saw under Ten Hag’.
After drawing with Chelsea and struggling to beat the second-best team in Greece, suddenly ‘very little has changed’ under Van Nistelrooy and ‘there were too many similarities with the Europa League draws against FC Twente, Porto and Fenerbahce to think a corner has been turned.’
Again, what a strange and completely unforeseeable outcome. Maybe Manchester United should appoint Amorim after all.
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Ruud awakening
‘It was just the kind of performance Van Nistelrooy would have been hoping for to at least press his claims for staying on under the new regime if not to make United change their minds over Amorim altogether’ – Wheeler, October 30.
‘Van Nistelrooy will take charge of Sunday’s game at home to Leicester City and then wait to see it he has a place in the new set-up. The indications are that he probably won’t’ – Wheeler, November 8
Slot it home
It might surprise Arne Slot that he ‘has only done the easy part at Liverpool’, having been what many considered an underwhelming appointment to the unforgiving role of replacing Jurgen Klopp, only to win 14 of his first 16 games to lead the Reds to the top of the Premier League and Champions League tables alongside a place in the Carabao Cup quarter-finals.
It feels like some of that might have been at least slightly difficult but The Sun website headline writers obviously know better.
The next question is whether Andy Dillon has been stitched up. The answer is no, not really.
‘Arne Slot has done pretty well at Liverpool, with one defeat in his first 16 games.’
Did that line not stick out as a bit daft when you read it through?
Apparently not, because the ultimately doomed Unai Emery once went on an 11-game winning run at Arsenal. The list of opponents he beat? West Ham, Cardiff, Newcastle, Vorskla Poltava, Everton, Brentford (Championship side in the League Cup), Watford, Qarabag, Fulham, Leicester and Sporting (Europa).
Slot obviously had it ‘easy’ with Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Milan and Leverkusen in his opening months.
‘Arsenal missed out on Champions League qualification in [Emery’s] first season by a solitary point – to Tottenham.
‘They reached the Europa League final but lost to Chelsea.’
Translation: they made a massive cock-up of the run-in by winning two and losing four of their final seven Premier League games, before being thrashed 4-1 in the Europa final by Chelsea.
‘By the end of the first season, some Arsenal players were laughing behind Emery’s back at his poor grasp of English.
‘The fans were confused about the style of play.
‘Home games were played out amid baffled silence, the way was lost and the glue between manager and club simply did not set hard.’
Not one single part of that critique of Emery’s Arsenal in 2019 is applicable to Slot and Liverpool five years later, aside from how they both succeeded legendary managers.
But West Ham fan Dillon continues unabated through a potted history of managers who have previously managed some games of football in an attempt to show Slot is not all that.
‘Bruce Rioch lost only three of his first 16 games,’ is first up. And while that is true it does include a two-legged League Cup tie against Third Division relegation-battlers Hartlepool. Maths fans might also have spotted that those three defeats are slightly more than Slot’s one in the same timeframe.
‘David Moyes lost only three of his first 16 Manchester United games,’ it says here. It’s good to consolidate the knowledge that three is more than one, with the additional nugget of the nine wins Moyes oversaw also being five fewer than Slot’s 14.
‘Avram Grant and Antonio Conte produced the goods when each took over from Jose Mourinho. Yet neither man really ‘got’ the club they were working for and paid the price,’ is a slightly more relevant argument because of the focus on vibes rather than results. Slot cannot possibly be criticised on the basis of the latter but replacing the popular Klopp does make the former tougher.
Yet that can only ever be purely hypothetical and again, there is literally nothing to suggest Slot will go the way of either fleeting manager at a club with a revolving door policy when it comes to head coaches.
‘Emery is enjoying a more fruitful time at Aston Villa with his second bite at the Prem cherry. Then again, he has replaced Steven Gerrard, who did not even get one full season.’
Because he was really bad and does not belong even in the vicinity of an already weird conversation about how Slot has apparently ‘only done the easy part at Liverpool’.
If ‘the easy part’ of management is winning games of association football, then he most certainly has.
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Get in Tuch
It has been public knowledge since his official unveiling on October 16 that Thomas Tuchel would not take over as England manager until January 1.
The reasons for that were explained at the time by FA CEO Mark Bullingham – “when we first spoke to him, we had our timescale, Thomas had his timescale and it just fitted really well” – and Tuchel himself:
“It was important for me to narrow it down into a project and not lose the focus, to start in another competition, the Nations League, then go into (World Cup) qualification and the tournament. I wanted to have a clean start and a bit of time to recharge fully, start in January, and start the first camp in March. We will have not a lot of time.”
There might also have been some obvious unspoken reasons, such as gardening leave contract clauses with Bayern Munich, a desire to have his staff in place or what would frankly be the most understandable motive ever of wanting to avoid a whole lot of poppy nonsense in his first days in charge. The Daily Mail might have a back page to fill after all.
But either way, the situation has been spelled out for weeks: Tuchel will not start as England manager in an official capacity until January. It feels like he might still be watching games and contemplating tactics in the meantime, just not with relatively meaningless matches against Greece and the Republic of Ireland as his focus.
Was that ever going to stop minds being lost when interim manager Lee Carsley casually dropped a quick line about how he and Tuchel had only spoken briefly over text and not yet face to face? Of course not.
John Cross of the Daily Mirror writes that ‘most England fans would find it bizarre he has not found time to speak to him’. Mediawatch is struggling to conjure much beyond a lazy shoulder shrug but maybe he’s right.
‘Carsley goes back to being Under-21s boss after his spell as interim,’ Cross continues. ‘He will provide players for England’s future and could give insight into the team.’
He could also do that in January. It doesn’t feel like an extra two months of knowing what makes Jordan Pickford tick or having Jarell Quansah’s pathway laid out in front of him will help Tuchel inspire England to World Cup glory in summer 2026.
Except no, this is an outrage and the reaction should be as such. We know this because the Daily Mail says so.
‘ENGLAND FARCE’ screams their headline to a piece in which Sami Mokbel recounts the ‘startling revelation’ made by Carsley, as well as the ‘bizarre development’ that he did not know about Tuchel’s appointment when he took charge of a game against Greece two days later.
Is it really that strange not to keep the interim manager with a specific six-game remit who is otherwise in charge of the U21s in the loop?
If Tuchel promptly ignores Carsley and explains how he has painstakingly avoided watching any games involving England players when he actually starts his role as manager then we might have a FARCE on our hands. This barely qualifies as a vaguely interesting side note.
