Fletcher the fall guy in latest United farce as INEOS prove they are far out of their depth – opinion

Well, he tried. Darren Fletcher probably wasn’t even particularly thirsty when INEOS passed him a chalice steaming with enough poison to knock out Bigfoot, handing him the role of Manchester United’s caretaker coach after the abrupt dismissal of Ruben Amorim. Anyone would at least be tempted to take a sip, and as a United man through and through the brave Scot drank it all down because if not him then who? No magic bullet Michael Carrick has now joined as interim head coach for the rest of the season, leaving his one-time midfield partner to reflect upon two underwhelming results in charge of a team in turmoil. Fletcher bows out with a 0% win rate as United boss, thanks to a dispiriting 2-2 draw with Burnley and a miserable FA Cup exit at the hands of Brighton and Hove Albion. It’s a meaningless statistic, but then so many of them are. But others can be used to identify some mitigating factors – in those two games, Fletcher’s team had 49 shots but only managed three goals. Short of substituting himself on for any of his misfiring forward line, there’s very little more he could have done. Using xG, United should have comfortably beaten Burnley and edged past Brighton. In many ways, then, Fletcher’s brief stint in charge was simply a continuation of the Amorim era, the underlying stats painting a positive picture while the only one that matters – the final score – going firmly against the Red Devils. INEOS ineptitude writ large As the Brighton defeat played out with a certain grim inevitability it was hard to imagine that things would have been any worse under the Portuguese. In fact, the evidence of slow growth with Amorim in charge was subtle but clear. Any hope that INEOS harboured that simply moving to a back four would transform the team was torpedoed before their very eyes. The internet tacticos were wrong – there are deeper issues than just the number of players lining up in defence. Instead of an emancipated squad revelling in a new manager bounce, the Burnley and Brighton games showed INEOS’s ineptitude in glorious technicolour. The group calling the footballing shots at the club hired and trusted a 3-4-3 fundamentalist to spearhead a brave new United but bottled it before he could see the project through. Simply swapping one beleaguered figure in the dugout for another is not going to fix that, and just as they did when backing then sacking Erik ten Hag they have to live with the consequences while confidence in them wears paper thin. Fletcher the fall guy Like a crash test dummy, Fletcher was used as a test case to see how bad things really are on the ground. A willing body to see if a change of formation could solve everything, he quickly found out that it is not that simple. There is to be no budget-friendly scenario where the Scot leads United to a top four finish, and he has already opted not to work with Carrick and to return to the U-18s. Amorim was far from perfect, and was ultimately the architect of his own downfall, but he exposed the flawed United hierarchy more clearly than anyone since Ralf Rangnick. Fletcher was the fall guy, a convenient figure who would do whatever he could to help the club, to see if the quick fix would work – it emphatically didn’t, so now it’s over to Carrick to steady the ship ahead of yet another pivotal summer for the club. Featured image Carl Recine via Getty Images The Peoples Person has been one of the world’s leading Man United news sites for over a decade. Follow us on Bluesky: @peoplesperson.bsky.social Joe Ponting Joe has spent more than half his life writing about football and all of it following United. As a child he told a doctor his name was ‘Paul Scholes’, but could never pick a pass like him no matter how much he tried. He cut his teeth working in print media for local newspapers and entered football journalism covering the grassroots game for the Non-League Paper. Here he achieved a career high, interviewing United legend Sir Bobby Charlton to get his views on the lower echelons of the football pyramid. To kill time during international breaks Joe writes album reviews and has strong views on post punk for Plus One Magazine.