Culture
Ten Hag’s ‘two trophies’ line is true – but it’s not the only measure of progress
It was about as close as an FA Cup-winning manager has come to a mic drop.
In a room of journalists who had spent the previous few days reporting on his bosses’ plan to replace him, a bruised, embattled but belligerent Erik ten Hag defended his record as manager of Manchester United.
“Two trophies in two years is not bad,” he said. “Three finals in two years is not bad. If they don’t want me, then I go somewhere else to win trophies because that is what I do.”
It was a good line, worth repeating, which he did. After Ten Hag’s contract was extended and his future settled, he sat down with MUTV in July and reiterated his “two trophies” point.
Then he said it again a few days later in Trondheim after United’s first pre-season friendly, adding: “Apart from (Manchester) City, that’s more than any other club in English football.”
He repeated it again after the friendly against Rangers in Edinburgh.
Then again on the tour of the United States.
That was just pre-season. Since the start of the campaign proper, Ten Hag has referenced his two domestic cup wins in six exchanges with journalists during pre- and post-match press conferences, to say nothing of interviews with broadcasters.
The latest instance, after Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Liverpool, came amid a tense exchange with one journalist who Ten Hag invited to name the “mistakes” his team were accused of making. After the journalist rattled off a long list of repeated errors, Ten Hag retreated to his old faithful.
“I have a different vision. I think we won, after City, the most trophies in English football,” he said. “I am sorry for you.”
He’s right, of course. It is as true now as it was at Wembley. But three games into a new season, an argument with which he neatly skewered his critics in May is fast becoming a crutch to fall back on.
On Friday, having just repeated his favourite point, Ten Hag added: “There’s only one thing in football and that’s at the end of the season if you win prizes, trophies, or not.” But as others have noted, that view is in stark contrast to that of his predecessor Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
“Any cup competition can give you a trophy but sometimes it’s more of an ego thing from other managers and clubs to finally win something,” Solskjaer said in March 2021.
“It’s not like a trophy will say, ‘We’re back’. It’s the gradual progression of being in and around the top of the league and the consistency and the odd trophies. Sometimes a cup competition can hide the fact you’re still struggling a little bit.”
Solskjaer’s words are those of a manager who had the opposite problem to Ten Hag. Under the Norwegian, United’s league finishes steadily improved — from sixth to third to second — but the trophy cabinet was bare.
Solskjaer was defending his record by claiming that the league is a true barometer of progress, just as Ten Hag is defending his record by pointing to silverware. As to which view is correct, opinions will vary.
Ten Hag with his other trophy, the Carabao Cup (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
As critical as it was for Solskjaer’s United to qualify for the Champions League on the final weekend of the 2019-20 campaign, do you remember who they beat that day? Do you remember the score? Maybe you do, but that 2-0 win behind closed doors at Leicester City is hardly a result that will echo through the ages.
Similarly, memories are not made by being runners-up in the league. Solskjaer’s side finished 12 points adrift of champions Manchester City the year they finished second, in 2021, having not topped the table from late January.
The only trophy United came close to winning that year was the Europa League. Speaking before the final in Gdansk, Solskjaer maintained that silverware sometimes “hides other facts”. But after United lost to Villarreal in a penalty shootout, he admitted he could not consider the season a success having failed to deliver silverware.
Ask some who have known the inner workings of Old Trafford over the years and they would say you cannot survive as United manager without winning trophies. Solskjaer’s spell in charge is arguably evidence of that, while Ten Hag’s proves the inverse: deliver a trophy plus the greatest day of United’s post-Sir Alex Ferguson era and you can survive anything, even the worst-ever Premier League finish.
There was also the 4-3 quarter-final win over Liverpool, of course — one of Old Trafford’s best games and atmospheres this century. Add the Carabao Cup victory on top, and the past two years have given supporters indelible memories, highs to balance out the lows.
But Solskjaer’s view is much closer to how performance is coldly assessed at the elite level in modern football. A league campaign over 38 games home and away is undeniably a truer gauge of a side’s quality, as well as typically the gateway to lucrative Champions League qualification, which affects budgets in a way the FA Cup cannot.
United may be the second-most successful side in English football over the past two years, as Ten Hag points out, but nobody would sincerely argue that they have been the second-best team.
Nor would anybody suggest United are closer to challenging City for major honours than Arsenal, despite Mikel Arteta only adding a Community Shield to his honours list since Ten Hag’s appointment.
That is the reality. In a quieter moment, outside the adversarial nature and pitched battles of a press conference, even Ten Hag would agree that trophies are not enough. You need both pots and points.
United’s decade-plus of underachievement will only have ended when the club are regularly competing for Premier League titles and reaching the latter stages of the Champions League again.
There were mitigating factors last season — injuries, off-field turmoil, takeover uncertainty, the absence of an established left-back — but United were below standard in the competitions that matter most.
That, despite domestic cup success, is why their manager is under pressure to prove progress has and can still be made, and why he will only be able to point to his two trophies for so long. When not staring down a room of journalists and television cameras, even Ten Hag would accept that.
GO DEEPER
Analysing Ashworth and Berrada’s Man Utd transfer briefing – ‘Erik has our full backing’
(Top photo: Erik ten Hag with the FA Cup; by Alex Pantling via Getty Images )
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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