Man Utd, Marcus Rashford and how Erik ten Hag is somehow to blame

‘Man Utd need boss with authority, not one like Ten Hag who is playing whack-a-mole with troublesome forwards’ says The Sun.

Blame it on the boss
Mediawatch feels more than a little sad about Marcus Rashford, who is seemingly on an incredibly self-destructive path. Drinking tequila for hours with total strangers is not the choice of a hedonistic party animal but somebody who has quite dramatically lost their way.

We cannot blame The Sun for dedicating pages to the story, especially after signing up the waitress who helped a fully clothed Rashford to bed at 3am in Belfast. None of it makes pleasant reading but it’s hard to argue that it is not newsworthy; this was no behind-closed-doors wallow but a very public performance in a major city.

But we do have to take issue with Sun man Dave Kidd, who sees this as an opportunity to heap criticism onto Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag, who apparently could have prevented this public display by being more authoritarian.

Presumably like Sir Alex Ferguson, who famously gate-crashed house parties and dragged grown-arsed men out of nightclubs. Because that seems like a sensible way to run a football club.

Here’s the headline:

Man Utd need boss with authority, not one like Ten Hag who is playing whack-a-mole with troublesome forwards

Ten Hag is being presented with a whole heap of troublesome issues, but let’s not pretend these were all preventable. Or that they all happened on Ten Hag’s watch. Or, if you’re Dave Kidd, you do pretend exactly that…

Rashford is 26 and seemingly heading off the rails. Ten Hag’s attempts at keeping his errant collection of forwards in line have resembled a bloke playing whack-a-mole in an amusement arcade.

First, Cristiano Ronaldo reared his head. Then Mason Greenwood. Then Antony. Then Jadon Sancho. Now Rashford.

He inherited a narcissistic pr*ck in Ronaldo. Indeed, in May 2023 – months after Ronaldo’s exit – Kidd himself described it as ‘the defining masterstroke of Erik ten Hag’s first season – fumigating the dressing-room by bombing out Cristiano Ronaldo’.

Mason Greenwood had first been arrested in January 2022, several months before Ten Hag became Manchester United manager. We don’t think we can pin that one on the Dutchman, who has never actually had Greenwood in his first-team squad.

We can pin the signing of Antony on Ten Hag, but if the Brazilian is guilty of any of the assaults of which he has been accused by various women, they can be filed under his own personal responsibility.

Sancho is absolutely a grey area, but Ten Hag inherited a player who had already had an incredibly underwhelming season at Manchester United. He gave him a leave of absence for mental health issues and then was well within his rights to seek an apology from the former England winger after his social media post accusing his manager of being a liar. Kidd himself calls it ‘rank indiscipline’.

And now Rashford, who was brilliant last season but unravelling this. It’s a cacophony of chaos but can it really be pinned on Ten Hag and his approach?

His attempts at playing the tough guy and trying to eradicate the club’s ‘no good culture’, have been an absolute failure – though by no means all the fault of the manager.

Elite footballers are a notoriously difficult bunch to manage. They tend to be streetwise and they are good at sniffing out a buffer.

United need a manager who can command genuine authority. These are few and far between.

‘Genuine authority’? What does that look like, Dave? After all, back in September one man (you) wrote this in The Sun:

WE know he’s a tough guy, who’s not afraid to make the tough calls, Erik ten Hag.

That much is brutally apparent.

So being a ‘tough guy’ is different from having ‘genuine authority’, and it’s the latter that would apparently stop a troubled 26-year-old – who was catapulted into a goldfish bowl with unbelievable pressure as a teenager – from going off the rails?

Could it be – and this really is a shot in the dark – that Rashford is a grown man and is making his own very public mistakes?

READ: Marcus Rashford and Man Utd might both be happier without each other

CULTURE wars
The theme continues on MailOnline:

Man United’s men behaving badly: After Marcus Rashford’s sick day after ’12-hour tequila bender’, Jadon Sancho calling his boss a liar, two legal sagas and a Cristiano Ronaldo row… is there a CULTURE of issues for Erik ten Hag?

‘Two legal sagas’ of course includes Mason Greenwood, who has never played a single minute of football for Ten Hag.

Where it all started to go wrong for Rashford
Jamie Jackson in The Guardian:

Marcus Rashford is standing before me on a sun‑buttered afternoon at the University of California in San Diego in July. He is 25, in prime condition, possesses a rare talent and scored 30 goals for his boyhood club the previous term. He is also 13 days into a bumper new £325,000-a-week, five-year contract that places him as Manchester United’s highest earner, and the calm of pre-season offers boundless optimism for the season to come.

Yet despite this there is lack of warmth and near‑zero eye contact from Rashford. It is a puzzle.

It is a real ‘puzzle’ why a man who had not yet scored in a pre-season he described as his “toughest” ever, fresh from the break-up of a long-term relationship and engagement, did not make eye contact with Jamie Paradise Jackson.