Manchester United stumbled again in the Premier League as a flurry of missed chances condemned them to a 2-1 defeat to West Ham at the London Stadium.
It was a sense of deja vu for many Man Utd fans, and Erik ten Hag was also at pains to stress that the team should have been out of sight in the first half.
They created enough but wasted all the chances which has been a theme of this season, leading to many bad results when maybe the performance didn’t warrant it.
Manchester United have created 26 big chances this season and have conspired to miss a remarkable 22 of them. It is worth seeing how the table would have looked if they had taken at least half of those.
However, Ten Hag’s insistence that scoring goals is the only remaining step in United’s evolution could get him sacked because he refuses to acknowledge the team’s bigger problem.
Erik ten Hag desperate to control the narrative
After the loss against West Ham, Ten Hag’s main focus was predictably on the penalty incident which saw the Hammers score the winner.
VAR’s explanation of the incident was shaky, while West Ham fans’ view on the penalty pained a complete picture of the situation.
However, before that, an MUTV pundit had said the penalty decision should have been immaterial at that stage because the game should have been killed by then.
Ten Hag echoed that sentiment in his press conference and repeatedly insisted that everything is fine and if the team just starts taking their chances, they will turn it around.
He uses stats to say how many chances they create but a bigger and holistic look at the stats shows his desperation to twist the narrative that paints him in a better light.
As per Understat, he is half-right when he says United have been wasteful because they’ve scored just eight from an xG of nearly 16.
However, his assertion that that is the only thing wrong couldn’t be further from the truth. His team have also been remarkably lucky to have conceded just 11 goals from expected goals against number of nearly 18.
Combining those stats, United sit 11th in the league table for xPts. That’s three places above their actual standing, but hardly the position to declare that United are back in the big leagues.
The reality is that United’s wastefulness has made a bad situation look worse, instead of turning a great situation bad.
Sleepwalking to the sack
Ten Hag is well within his rights to protect his own record and that is something many managers do when they sense the eng is near.
Jose Mourinho’s “football heritage” rant is in the infamous stuff of legends in Man Utd’s history and Ten Hag is following pretty much a similar path.
That’s damning because instead of acknowledging the problems, he keeps alienating the fans with tone-deaf statements that are too far away from reality to be taken seriously.
At least when Mourinho said his rant, it was in bad taste but all factual. Ten Hag’s assertions can be glanced at and disproven almost immediately which adds to the embarrassment.
He has survived two international breaks but with Chelsea at Old Trafford on the horizon, Ineos shouldn’t make the same mistake thrice if that game goes wrong.
The Dutchman deserved a chance under the new structure but the situation is genuinely becoming scarily bad to just “keep faith” anymore.
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