Back in the old days of the then fledgling Premier League, before Arsène Wenger arrived at Arsenal and the money turned up at Chelsea and Manchester City, Newcastle were frequently Manchester United’s biggest rivals in what was always an entertainingly unequal contest.
Unequal because by the mid-90s Alex Ferguson had turned Manchester United into a sleek, efficient trophy-winning machine, whereas Newcastle were run more along the lines of a soap opera. At their best under Kevin Keegan they were a match for anyone, though the actual business of playing winning football often seemed secondary to a whole series of distractions on and off the pitch. One United was predictable and hard-nosed about the business of coming out on top, the other was prone to wild fluctuations of fortune and emotion which in the end had an effect on results.
Coming back to the present day, Newcastle have slipped from the running completely, their soap opera edging into a black farce that stopped being funny or engaging a long time ago. Yet their old incarnation, that odd mixture of idealism and naivety that never really had a chance of success, is currently being imitated by Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s Manchester United. At the moment the biggest club in England is not so much a club as a collection of ongoing issues, some of them unresolved, one or two of them possibly unresolvable.
At a time when Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham are proving the value of joined-up thinking right through the club, backing their bold managerial strategists with swift and decisive incursions into the transfer market, United are still visibly a concoction of the ideas, hopes and, not to put too fine a point on it, mistakes of three or four different managers. If City winning titles with record numbers of points can be likened to a shiny, state of the art spaceship hovering effortlessly and untouchably above the rest of the Premier League, United remain at the Flying Bedstead stage of development.
Whereas essentially in the next few weeks Pep Guardiola, Jürgen Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino will be asking their players for more of the same, Solskjær and his team will still be trying to address the problems that needed to be fixed last season. What most, including United themselves, deemed necessary after José Mourinho’s departure was a director of football, someone to facilitate incoming transfers and provide a degree of continuity should further managerial changes take place. That the club identifies the need yet still stalls on the implementation is typical of the stasis that has surrounded Old Trafford in recent years.
Solskjaer has claimed to be happy with his striking options after the late but predictable departure of Romelu Lukaku, yet this stance is at odds with United’s clumsy last-minute bid for Mario Mandzukic, such an obvious attempt at a panic buy that the player himself was unimpressed. This is not the way leading clubs go about transfer business and everyone at United must know it.
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Solskjær himself is still an untried manager, at best a rookie in terms of cracking the top of the Premier League. While almost anyone with a smile on his face would have been welcome as an antidote to the saturnine Mourinho, just as much went wrong for Solskjær last season as went right. Should United start the new season as weakly as they finished the old one the manager’s position will be under scrutiny from the word go, as will the performances of some of the big name players who appear to have been bound to the club by nothing more than improved contracts.
Some of the other distractions at United include an unsatisfactory ownership model, a less than decisive leader in Ed Woodward, the embarrassing failure of Alexis Sánchez and the number of players – Anthony Martial, Jesse Lingard, Fred – who struggle to showcase their undoubted talent with the consistency a big club demands. All the while United remain the country’s most newsworthy and talked about club, even if others are winning all the meaningful prizes, with ex-pros such as Paul Ince and Paul Scholes usually willing to offer a public commentary on where the team is going wrong.
That is a long list for even the most experienced manager to sort out, and Solskjær is clearly not that. Though he was able to make a crucial difference in the middle of last season – like Ilsa and Rick in Casablanca, he will always have Paris – the brutal truth of the matter is that Paris Saint-Germain are an only slightly better assortment of ill-fitting and overpaid individual talents than United themselves.
When Solskjær and his players came up against genuine class in the next round of the Champions League the gulf was there for all to see – United were beaten home and away by Barcelona and went out at the quarter-final stage without scoring a goal in two legs. Fair enough, it was said, no one really expected to beat Barcelona anyway, even Ferguson used to find that difficult and none of the versions of United since he stepped down have looked remotely capable of troubling the Spanish giants. Yet Liverpool managed it in the semi, even overcoming a three goal first-leg deficit.
The inevitable conclusion is that if United are still a long way off Barcelona, they are even further from the standard being set at Liverpool, where arguably more than at City, teamwork and tactical awareness are being taken to new heights and ambition recognises no limits.
