If you’re going to dig yourself out of a hole, it helps to be digging in the right direction.
For Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Manchester United, for too long there has been only one trajectory, not upwards towards the gaping blue yonder but further into the mud and muck, beavering downwards with the wrong shovel and no safety equipment. Are we in the right place? Is this even the right hole? Does this look like a grave to anyone else? Doesn’t matter. Just keep digging.
Solskjaer’s season will be measured – is already being measured – in culpability. Who exactly is to blame when the reactor explodes? The factory director at the helm when the thing went up? The party bosses who ignored years of safety checks and outdated regulations? The workers, made lazy and complacent through years of boredom and entropy? Or can it all be passed off as dumb bad luck; patch things up, put up an exclusion zone and fob off the press with excuses, denials and mis-directions. Nothing to see/hear; that radioactive cloud drifting over the Stretford End was there already.
Exactly how far back the inquest begins depends on how forensically one chooses to examine smouldering core, how deeply into the nuclear sludge of United’s immediate past, nose-bags and biohazard suits on, one is brave enough to rummage. But the situation undeniably last week reached heightened levels of alarm for United supporters, epitomised by the deteriorating cool of a manager whom 12 months earlier was being heralded a messiah, now seemingly coming to terms with being badly out of his depth.
After Sunday’s 2-0 defeat to Liverpool at Anfield, Solskjaer damned the league-leaders with faintest praise: "They are the most direct team in the league," he chimed caustically about the team that now leads his by 30 points. "They put you under so much pressure and I thought our defenders and midfielders handled it well.
"When the long balls go for Mane, Salah and Firmino, then it is very difficult as they always look to go in behind you."
The old get out of jail free card – our opponents beat us with long balls so did they even beat us at all? The fact is Liverpool are statistically one of the worst ‘offenders’ for playing long balls in the Premier League this season. They are also the team with the second-best average possession percentages, but they didn’t need to show it in order to beat United. It was sufficient simply to fire ‘long’ (read direct; accurate; efficient) balls into the spaces that Solskjaer’s £190m back four were conspicuously failing to occupy.
If it’s simple to win with long balls, then why did United not spend the afternoon sending them up for the lightning quick Anthony Martial to race onto, bypassing a midfield that this season has displayed all the robustness, creativity and guile of a dust cloud?
At best, Solskjaer’s comments were lazy and old-fashioned, childishly nudging supporters to judge that a few well-placed long passes equate Jurgen Klopp’s team with nothing so grand as Vinny Jones’ Wimbledon, all sweat and leather, rather than the exalted grandees that, say, United were when they were winning a treble here, a Premier League and Champions League double there.
At worst, the manager’s words conveyed an alarming failure to grasp the seriousness of what’s going on around him. It’s the clarion call of a coach in terminal distress; seeing things that aren’t there and, more worryingly, failing to see things that are.
Whether Solskjaer truly believes his own implications – that Liverpool are a workmanlike endeavour that shirked the challenge of taking on his brave, footballing United team – is not the relevant point. Whether he is being dishonest to the fans or to himself, whether he is unable to see the iceberg approaching or is simply refusing to raise the alarm, it points to a manager badly out of control of his circumstances.
Before Sunday’s game, Solskjaer gave the grim news that Marcus Rashford’s back injury, picked up days earlier in the FA Cup against Wolves, is worse than feared and will likely mean a lay-off of several weeks. Criticism of the manager was inevitable; why was the team’s most effective striker bandaged up and thrown on in a midweek FA Cup replay? Blurry short-sightedness from a manager still giddy about the Cup from the days when it was one of three trophies hoisted high above an open-top bus through the centre of Manchester? Maybe. A more likely answer is that he craved a win at any cost and Rashford represented United’s best chance of getting one.
Either way, it was the dialogue surrounding the England striker’s injury that gave the most cause for concern, specifically the way Solskjaer altered the narrative around Rashford’s fitness. Before the game, he claimed the injury pre-dated the Wolves game; afterwards, wary of his own role in hamstringing the team’s best player, he insisted it was a fresh injury. Were it not for the roster of sponsors and corporate branding decking the halls, it could have come straight from the mouth of the Politburo - the people will believe what we tell them to believe.
It all comes back to culpability. Ultimately, the Old Trafford machine is too cumbersome, beset by too many layers of management, for the coach to take the brunt of the flak. It wasn’t Solskjaer, after all, who authorised that eye-watering spending that has taken United expensively round in circles for years.
Gary Neville put it best this week when he said: "I can't believe, with the investment that has been put into the squad over the last five or six years, you end up with that out on the pitch.
"If you don't lose your job for overseeing that investment, that wage bill and putting that team out on the pitch, something is really wrong."
At the back of this, there is a destructive loyalty that exists between United’s chief decision-maker and the men keeping him in his job.
The Glazer family feel a tremendous gratitude towards Ed Woodward for his role in helping secure the loans that helped them purchase the club in 2005, and latterly for his work to grow United’s commercial reach in foreign markets.
For all its clout, the club does not enjoy the same checks and balances between the football and business sides of its operation as it did when former chief executive David Gill and Sir Alex Ferguson were the stakeholders.
So Solskjaer will keep digging, for as long as Woodward keeps signing off on plans for a bigger and bigger hole. How deep is too deep may not become clear until it’s too late to climb out.
