TWO managers who arrived as saviours, greeted by a fanbase and in at least one case a squad who didn’t much care who the new boss was, so long as he wasn’t the previous boss.
Two managers whose sides have shown flickers of promise without fully convincing. Two managers whose sides need a positive result if they are to get in their respective European competitions of choice. Sunday’s meeting of Everton and Manchester United already feels like one of those games that will send the losers into a swamp of doubt.
United’s defeat at Barcelona on Tuesday means they have now lost five out of their last seven games. The uplift they enjoyed in the first three months after Ole Gunnar Solskjaer took over has faded now. He has let it be known that he feels the players are perhaps not as fit as they should be, which would certainly explain recent sluggish displays. It’s true that fitness is an easy and familiar way for a new manager to blame his predecessor but United’s running stats in the early months of this season were notably low.
Life as an Everton fan:
Beat Chelsea at home
Beat West Ham away
Beat Arsenal at homeLose to already relegated Fulham!
— S (@EFC_95) April 13, 2019
The question now, of course, is whether Ed Woodward acted precipitously in making Solskjaer’s position permanent when he could have had an extra two months to assess him. For all the explanation that having a manager in place made contract talks and transfer negotiations easier, the timing of that decision does now seem a little odd.
But the fact is that whoever the manager is, there is a massive rebuilding job to be done at Old Trafford. Four of the defensive block of five (including David De Gea) at the Camp Nou had played in the 2-1 defeat in Basel in 2011 that saw United go out on the group stage of the Champions League.
That suggests a profound failure of recruitment, something exacerbated by a lack of investment in scouting and youth development. Solskjaer has never undertaken such a project, but then virtually no coach in the modern game has. In that regard, his best quality is probably that he will not be impatient and fans will not be (too) impatient with somebody who remains immensely popular.
At Everton, meanwhile, Marco Silva’s biggest problem is consistency. To an extent, that comes with the territory – one of the reasons gifted players are at Everton rather than one of the big six clubs is their lack of consistency – but still, the situation at Goodison seems extreme.
It’s not just that they can play Arsenal off the park and then lose at Fulham, it’s that even within the same game there are wild swings. They were excellent, for instance, in the first half at Newcastle last month and went 2-0 up, yet collapsed in the second half to lose 3-2. At home to Chelsea, they were poor before half-time and fortunate to go in level, but dominated the second half to win 2-0.
4 – Manchester United have lost four consecutive away matches in all competitions for the first time since October 1999 – current manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær featured in all four of those 1999 defeats. Recurrence. pic.twitter.com/OlHGuZgz5P
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) April 16, 2019
That makes the job Silva is doing very hard to read. He’s averaging 1.35 points per game, a fraction less than the 1.42 Sam Allardyce managed last season. The style may be more palatable, and there is certainly nothing like the groundswell of opinion against him that there was almost from the start against Allardyce, but equally few are entirely convinced.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be a major concern – at either Old Trafford or Goodison. Before our age of hot takes and what Alex Ferguson saw as the reality TV-driven urge to vote somebody out each week, managers were afforded time. In Brian Clough’s first seasons at Derby County and at Nottingham Forest, he finished in the bottom half of the second flight.
Within five years he’d won the league with Derby; it took three with Forest. Alex Ferguson was in his seventh year at Manchester United when he won the league for the first time. Herbert Chapman was in his sixth at Arsenal. Don Revie just avoided relegation in his first season at Leeds; it took him three years even to be promoted.
But patience is rarely the modern way. Nobody accepts any more that a manager may need to learn on the job, to develop relationships with players and to correct his faults. There has already been grumbling about Silva and doubts are understandably beginning to grow about Solskjaer.
Both inherited a difficult situation and neither has been entirely convincing in dealing with it. Sunday might offer some clue as to whether they will.
