You can see glimpses of how the Dutchman’s plan may pay off eventually. For now, pretty much anything could happen
“What can you do?” Erik ten Hag kept asking in the press conference room in Copenhagen. Little tip: maybe stop doing that. By all means have a little whinge about VAR after a narrow defeat in Europe. But perhaps drawing everyone’s attention to your own essential powerlessness is not the smartest move at a time when you have lost nine out of your last 16 games and your leadership is widely held to be in crisis. And people said Ten Hag couldn’t turn Manchester United into Ajax.
In one sense, the 4-3 defeat against Copenhagen was of a piece with United’s season to date: calamity snatched from the jaws of promise, an inability to defend simple crosses, an unswerving determination to step on whatever rakes were strewn in their path. It was the third time this season United had lost from a winning position. And yet if the Copenhagen game was the perfect encapsulation of how things have gone wrong for United, it also offered evidence of how things may yet, with a little time and a littleluck, go right.
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