Five other struggling Premier League managers grateful Ten Hag is taking all the heat

We’re three weeks into the Premier League season and it’s already the first international break. It seems to come earlier every season.

But what the first international break means is that proper football that matters stops, and the transfer window is closed and there is absolutely nothing for the football media to talk about other than whoever has been declared the current Beleaguered Manager in charge of a Cracked-Badge Club.

Very obviously, that manager is currently Erik ten Hag and that club is Manchester United. But there are a few other managers who can count themselves pretty fortunate that United have suffered such a conspicuous bout of bed-sh*tting to begin the campaign.

Enzo Maresca (Chelsea)
Clearly the manager who was most in need of United selflessly making this kind of attention-hoarding start.

Maresca, with his total lack of top-flight managerial experience, was a bizarre appointment by a bizarre football club. And the thing with Chelsea now is that things are so unusual there, their methods so utterly divergent from everybody else’s, that it no longer even matters if it kind of works. Nobody else likes the way they’re doing things, nobody else trusts the way they’re doing things.

It will take almost nothing for Fleet Street to sharpen every knife and take full aim at Todd Boehly’s Grand Experiment and, by extension, the rookie manager tasked with being its public face and having to say legitimately mental things like ‘It is fine and normal to banish 15 people from the first-team training facilities, actually.’

Chelsea’s actual on-field start has been just about okay. Dignity was retained in a predictable opening defeat to Man City, Wolves were thrashed in thrilling if wild and surely unsustainable fashion, and a home draw with Palace is a bit annoying but not disastrous.

But even with that start it’s still true that the only plausible thing that could have kept Chelsea and Maresca out of the harshest early season spotlight was Manchester United doing precisely what Manchester United have done.

Sean Dyche (Everton)
Started the season by getting thrashed at home by Brighton on the opening day and then given an even harsher lesson by an absurdly generous Spurs team that has long since been thoroughly worked out by all but the worst and/or thickest football teams in the land.

There is only one team that could somehow contrive to make it even worse in the next game, and Everton delivered in the grand manner by suffering what will, even at this early stage, take some topping as the baddest beat of the season by losing at home to Bournemouth having led 2-0 with 85 minutes on the clock.

Dyche’s team have conceded 10 goals in three games, a worse record even than Wolves. While the absence of Jarrad Branthwaite offers some mitigation, it’s also worth noting that the three teams to plunder those 10 goals in three games against the Toffees have managed just seven between them in their other six games

If Dyche can’t even make his teams hard to beat and score against then he has problems at a club seemingly on a never-ending quest to uncover new ways of dispensing misery to long-suffering fans.

But for a true picture of how under the radar Dyche currently is, he is literally joint favourite in the sack race with Ten Hag and there is barely a headline to be found with the words ‘Dyche sack’ included in attempts to sate the unending hunger of the Google overlords.

Ange Postecoglou (Tottenham)
Mate. Spurs have been quite rubbish for quite a while now, and Postecoglou has largely escaped any attention for it. Got foolishly arsey with the fans around the Man City game last year and had had more money to sirens than any Spurs manager.

Given his side remains bad in all the same ways it proved to be in the run-in last year, he should absolutely be under greater scrutiny.

It’s not just that Spurs aren’t winning as many games now, but who they do manage to beat that’s revealing.

Their only five wins in the last 14 Premier League games have been against Luton, Burnley, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield United and Everton. They’ve drawn with West Ham and Leicester and lost – generally quite convincingly – to anyone half-decent. Their form since winning eight of their first 10 games last season in a shock-and-awe blitz is bleakly mid-table.

Watching the Leicester and Newcastle games this season it’s hard to shake the notion that this is in fact the most ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ team ever assembled. They and Ange have been worked out. And it’s Arsenal next.

Gary O’Neil (Wolves)
It was always going to take quite a bit for O’Neil – a man viewed with plenty of sympathy for his Bournemouth axing and credit for his Wolves efforts in the bank – to rise to prominence in the early-season frenzy, but his Wolves side have given it a red hot crack.

Conceding six goals at home to the club everyone else has already agreed is too stupid for words, the club whose most conspicuous banter has been to spend all the money on earth buying all the footballers on earth and yet still not having a proper striker they can rely on, is not the work of a football club in a healthy place.

O’Neil is a manager who needs United – or at a push Chelsea – to continue hoarding all the focus with their assorted and varied atrocities because otherwise this could become bad start of epic levels given their fixture list; their next six Premier League games are against Newcastle, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Brentford, Man City and Brighton. Oof.

Russell Martin (Southampton)
One of the big advantages of being a low-key manager of a low-key club is that you can absolutely go around losing your first three games and have nobody outside either notice or care. Even if United had won every game 6-0, Martin could probably still safely walk the streets without being recognised.