Perhaps they constituted a five-man firing squad in the plush seats. Or maybe, as Erik ten Hag said, they are colleagues with whom he is in constant communication. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Sir Dave Brailsford, Omar Berrada, Dan Ashworth and Jason Wilcox sat in a row at Villa Park.
They will have a more private meeting on Tuesday: long scheduled, just as Ratcliffe had planned for weeks to turn up in the Second City. Yet some meetings become more important, more consequential that others. The new Manchester United hierarchy, the Ineos administration, always intended to make regular assessments of how it is going at Old Trafford.
A one-word summary may be ‘badly’.
The immediate issue is if disruptors who have brought considerable change were mistaken to opt for continuity in one position. Ineos have made around 250 staff redundant. They will have to determine it should have been 251, if they got their first major decision wrong.
They retained Ten Hag. It is three months since they triggered a one-year extension to his contract, six weeks since Berrada and Ashworth gave Ten Hag their full support, albeit while saying the choice to keep him was made before their arrivals but three days since Ratcliffe declined to offer the Dutchman his backing.
“We are all on board together, on one page,” said Ten Hag. “I speak continually to them. Every day we speak. We communicate very openly and transparently.” Privately, he is thought to be realistic, knowing he requires results. Publicly, he talked too much of a fourth clean sheet of the season but a 0-0 draw with Aston Villa may have bought a little time for a manager who has spent £600m.
Yet the United progress report might show more evidence of regression. A five-game winless run in all competitions is United’s longest for five years. Five months after their lowest ever Premier League finish of eighth, they sit 14th. They have not scored in three league games; indeed, they have only outscored Southampton in the top flight. In all competitions, they have played 11 matches and only beaten Fulham, Southampton and Barnsley. They are 21st in the Europa League table.
Which, presumably, was not quite what Ratcliffe had in mind when he paid £1.3bn for a quarter of the club. Money forms part of the case for the prosecution of Ten Hag. He has spent more than £600m and yet his rescuer, the man who orchestrated the stalemate at Villa, was an accidental signing, a 36-year-old free transfer.
“Everybody on the pitch should be ashamed because Jonny Evans is man of the match,” said Dimitar Berbatov, a former teammate.
Admirable as Evans is, he is also an indictment. A sticking plaster appears United’s best central defender. Or, at the least, the most reliable. Meanwhile, another veteran recruited on a free transfer, Christian Eriksen, now looks the most trusted central midfielder, though Ten Hag has signed someone in that position for at least £50m in three successive summers.
Evans was restored as, and while Ten Hag dressed it up as rotation, he dropped two of his former Ajax centre-backs, players acquired for a combined cost of £100m. Lisandro Martinez fell from such favour that while Matthijs de Ligt and Victor Lindelof came on, he did not. Martinez and De Ligt were awful against Porto; the Dutchman – and Ten Hag’s fondness for signing them has not gone unnoticed – has had a wretched start to his United career.
Another summer signing, Manuel Ugarte, has not been seen since his disastrous display against Tottenham. Joshua Zirkzee came on and took his goal drought to nine games. Ten Hag’s biggest buy, Antony, came on, raising his tally of Premier League minutes this season from one.
The safety-first selection ground out a draw at Villa, yet the teamsheet alone illustrated how plans have gone awry. It was a world apart from the embarrassment against Tottenham or the anarchy in Porto. And yet, in very different ways, the last three games are not what United want to stand for.
Earlier in the week, Ten Had asked to be judged at the end of the season. But one assessment will come on Tuesday; the Dutchman will hope it does not come with a finality to the verdict. It would reflect badly on Ratcliffe and Brailsford to sack Ten Hag so soon after choosing to keep him, on Berrada and Ashworth to do so a few weeks after backing him, on the new regime in general.
It may be easier to grant Ten Hag a little longer; fairer, too, after the character his side showed at Villa Park. But his future, along with United’s underperformance, feels central to the agenda to the meeting. It may be an Ineos inquest and if Ten Hag survived in part because Ratcliffe and co believed the structure around the manager was faulty, now they are the structure. And that could further imperil the manager.
