The relationship between Erik ten Hag and Jadon Sancho is at breaking point, on that we can at least probably all agree. Manchester United’s manager picked two wingers in his match-day squad who share a combined seven league starts for the club over a player who cost them £73m. He then publicly criticised that player after the game, accusing him of not being at the standard required in training.
Even if that was an attempt at deflection – Ten Hag also said that an offside decision was onside, remember – United’s manager disciplined Marcus Rashford for reportedly being 45 seconds late to a team meeting.
The punishment for publicly calling the manager a liar and accusing him of making you a scapegoat will be severe. That first meeting at training will be ingloriously awkward. Take a seat, Jadon.
I hope that we’re allowed to feel some sympathy for both parties. Two years ago, Sancho was one of his nation’s brightest young talents who wanted to come back to England to prove that he had become a man. The mistake, it seems, was joining United: this club has dragged big-name signings down until we doubt whether they were ever that good at all. Sancho is one of many.
Ten Hag is tasked with taking a club forward who are anchored down by the weight of their ghastly ownership and reasons that he has no time for those who he is not convinced are fully committed or ready for his cause.
He will have known the potential fallout of criticising Sancho’s training, but he is the manager and therefore he calls the shots. It wasn’t him who spent £73m on Sancho and he has other options. The least he is asking for is your best.
If this incident teaches us anything that means anything at all, it is to appreciate what we cannot know, not what we do. We often talk of pressure from media and supporters, but we cannot know the weight of expectation a player places upon themselves. Everything – physical, emotional, mental – is a fine balance. Every decision you make will be questioned and every action is fit for public consumption.
We cannot know the damage of a psychological culture in which accepting a mistake is to admit weakness. Show weakness when the stakes are so high, and the competition is so fierce, is to risk a spiralling decline. And so you refuse to accept that something is wrong, you bottle it up and you learn not to recognise that something isn’t working until it gets too big to ignore.
When you finally accept the original mistake, you worry that everyone else has passed you in the outside lane. When the air is thin, how can you ever hope to recover? We cannot see the invisible worry lines that exist between players in the same position.
You are fighting against teammates to be better than them and you want them to fail in that attempt. You can want your team to do well without you in it, of course, but everyone is in it for themselves. The journey is too hard and too long for anything else to be true.
So fires of resentment build: why is that guy starting? Why isn’t he criticising his behaviour? What about me?
We cannot know the number of plates that a manager must spin, doubling in number after every high-profile defeat. Everything you say is recorded for eternity to be used against you if required (or quickly forgotten if it is proven correct).
You are responsible for two groups of individuals (players and staff), two teams and must manage the relationships with those senior to you and also the specifics of every player’s personality – who needs what and when and how and how much?
We cannot fully appreciate the tensions that inevitably exist between players and coaches when this occasionally goes wrong.
That is the inevitable fallout of the universality of football coverage: people mistakenly believe that they are being told everything and mistakenly believe everything that they are told. When the walls are constructed and the doors closed, it invites the gaps to be filled with half-baked theory and discourse. That is not our fault: football offers us half a script and invites us to write our own soap opera.
We do not know yet the details of Sancho vs Ten Hag (for that is how it must be sold). A cry for help from a forlorn footballer unable to cope with his potential slipping through his fingers? The tantrum of a highly-paid sportsperson who isn’t pulling their weight?
The cruel deflection of a manager intent only on self-preservation? The lashing out of a scorned winger who was desperate to get out of Dodge before the window closed?
None of this is simple. More pertinently, given the setting: none of it is helpful to Manchester United.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/ueyH6b4
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