There isn’t a SINGLE manager in world football outside of Guardiola who would have us finishing higher than 3rd last year or second this year. And that’s the issue with the nonsense that gets posted about Solskjær. He gets spoken about as if he’s the worst manager in the league when it’s utter cock. If he was useless we wouldn’t get to semi-finals regularly, we’d constantly lose to the big teams, we’d be fecking 9th or something, not sodding second. He is getting what he should out of the squad.
The two best managers in the world are at our rivals. Both those teams have BETTER starting players than us. One of those teams is funded by a fecking state. We have an injury prone 34 year old as our best striker and Dan James is currently our best right winger. What do people actually expect? We’ve completely dicked up the last 8 years by blowing our inheritance on absolute twaddle. We then exasperated that by hiring past egotistical shit heads as managers and letting our rivals hire who we should have hired. There is no word in the English language to appropriately describe the incompetence of how this club has been run the last 8 years. Will Solskjær win the league without significant spending? No. But who the feck out there will? Rodgers? Ancelotti? What have they shown in their careers to suggest they can massively overachieve and beat Pep with the squad and resources he has? We need 4 starting players to challenge. It’s the same 4 starting players we needed last year. It will in all likelihood be the same 4 players we need next year. And we’d need those 4 players regardless of who the manager is. Nobody is turning a CM of Fred/Mctominay, a CB of Maguire/Lindelof and our front three into title winners. You’re in fecking cuckoo land if you think they are.
There is a lot truth to all of this.
But....
I can’t speak for anyone else but my issue is not our results, league positions, or finishing behind city and Liverpool. I expect it hell I’ll accept it.
My issue is the shite football and I think that’s the same for a lot of others.
When Mourinho was here he was up against the same conditions. Finished 2nd and won trophies yet people loathed him because of our style. Just because it’s Ole doesn’t mean people are suddenly going to be okay with it.
The whole selling point of Ole being our manager was that he’d come in and be completely different to Mourinho and LVG. He’d take risks, he’s play expansive, he’d bring some of the old swagger back, he understood United fans need to see us play on the front foot.
At this point two and a half years in, I’m seeing the same pragmatic, cautious, unadventurous, tedious approach to games that I saw under LvG and Mourinho.
If we’re gonna sit back and watch city and Liverpool win all the big trophies, at least we need to go down swinging. Not pathetically drawing to the likes of palace and west Brom and barely even trying to win the games.