Manchester United have quickly moved on from the Erik ten Hag era as not only has Ruud van Nistelrooy impressed as the interim manager, but Ruben Amorim is also set to arrive as the permanent boss.
Ruben Amorim is arriving in a wave of expectation after running riot in Portugal with Sporting but that is exactly the sentiment Erik ten Hag arrived with after impressing at Ajax.
It didn’t end well for him and the hope is that Amorim bucks that trend but the wounds of Ten Hag’s sacking are still somewhat fresh.
That’s especially true because so many of the players in the current Man Utd squad were brought by him, played under him previously, or came through his connections.
Andre Onana is one of those with the Ajax connections and the Cameroonian has opened up on why Ten Hag was sacked in a straightforward manner.
Andre Onana on Erik ten Hag sacking
When Ten Hag was relieved of his duties as Man Utd manager, his team had won just four out of their 14 games across all competitions.
They were 14th in the Premier League, 21st in the Europa League, and the mitigating factors were running thin while the performance kept collapsing.
The fact that the players have followed his sacking by dispatching Leicester 5-2 in the immediate next game, then a battling draw vs Chelsea has raised familiar questions.
Players have been repeatedly accused of throwing the manager under the bus in the past but Onana spoke to the media in the lead-up to the PAOK game in Europe and set the record straight in a direct response.
He said: “When I heard he was leaving obviously I felt bad It’s not always easy for players to understand when a manager is leaving, but at the end of the day the club have to make a decision and we have to follow.
“He is a very good manager, I have a good relationship with him. Why things didn’t work here is we didn’t win enough games. It’s simple. At a high level, it’s not easy, sometimes you have to pay the price. Unfortunately, it was him. The players gave everything, we tried our best but it just didn’t work.”
Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos have had enough
Onana stresses that the simple reason why Ten Hag was sacked is the lack of good results and while that’s true, the players constantly letting leads slip and missing chances didn’t help his case.
They might have been trying this time, and to their credit, there weren’t any reports of dressing room discontent in the lead-up to this sacking like there had been for others before him.
However, that just reflects badly on the players’ quality and if Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s assessment of this squad is anything to go by, they have had enough.
He recently implied that no manager can succeed if the squad is not good enough and that was a damning indictment on the quality of players at Old Trafford currently.
Onana, however, backed his teammates to turn it around and succeed under Amorim.
He said: “It is a different system but my team-mates here are all pragmatic. Everyone here is capable to play in each system, so I don’t think this will be any issue for us. We have big players and they will step up.”
With Amorim being Ineos’ man, expect them to back him over the players because they’ve now hitched their wagon to him, while Ten Hag is someone they received from the Glazers and were effectively forced to keep on.
Onana has a point about a simple reason behind the manager’s sacking, but somebody else might fall before the next manager does if Ineos’ direction is any indication.
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