Culture
Ten Hag thinks Manchester United are unlucky. He's only partly right
You may have watched Manchester United reach their second FA Cup final in as many seasons by the leather of Haji Wright’s left boot and considered it a fortunate escape that their collapse from 3-0 up against Championship opposition did not deserve.
Erik ten Hag did not think United got lucky, though. If anything, he was at his most impassioned in his post-match press conference when discussing his side’s misfortune, specifically for Coventry City’s stoppage-time penalty, arguing it was an “absolutely crazy” decision to award a handball against Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
Ten Hag took much the same line of argument before United’s last Premier League outing against Bournemouth. While accepting that “like a minister” he will bear ultimate responsibility for results, he could not help but bemoan his side’s bad luck over the past eight months.
“It’s huge. A lot went against us this season,” he said. And though United’s misfortune is not limited to refereeing calls in Ten Hag’s mind, that was where he trained his focus.
“You see all the penalties we conceded last week (against Chelsea and Liverpool) could also have been going in another way. You think over the course of a season sometimes you will get one, sometimes you will concede one. This season it feels like we only concede.”
United have been awarded five penalties this season and have conceded 11, with four given away in the opening four games of the Champions League group stage. While most of those in Europe were not especially contentious, many of the six conceded in the Premier League have sparked debate.
Some have been soft — Rasmus Hojlund and Casemiro’s concessions against Manchester City and Wolverhampton Wanderers in particular — and others more debatable. None, it should be noted, have resulted in the officials responsible being stood down for the subsequent round of fixtures, as happened after Wolves were denied a penalty at Old Trafford on the opening weekend of the season.
All those decisions, however, are a matter of opinion. Outside of offside, most refereeing calls are subjective by nature and, as the era of VAR has taught us, there are different definitions of what constitutes a clear and obvious mistake.
Ten Hag has more substantive grounds for complaint on arguably the biggest single reason for United’s struggles: player injuries and enforced absences. The revolving door of United’s treatment room has seen all but four senior squad members — Bruno Fernandes, Andre Onana, Diogo Dalot and Alejandro Garnacho — pass through it at some point this year.
The 2-2 draw at Bournemouth was the first time United have named an unchanged line-up since the opening two games of a season ravaged by injury. According to data from transfermarkt, United’s squad have collectively spent 1,710 days sidelined since the start of the season.
Ten Hag said last week he has not been able to pick his “favourite” line-up since the 2-1 victory over Manchester City at Old Trafford in January of last year. Just as United’s injuries have appeared to abate, new concerns have cropped up.
Fresh problems for Willy Kambwala, Mason Mount and Sofyan Amrabat meant United’s absentee list swelled into double figures again ahead of the semi-final, while Marcus Rashford and Scott McTominay both appeared to be carrying issues when substituted at Wembley.
Marcus Rashford walks off after being injured at Wembley (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
The absence of either of his first-choice left-backs for the majority of the season has, Ten Hag feels, had a material effect on United’s ability to play the way he wants. Lisandro Martinez’s unavailability has deprived him of a player who had a transformative effect during his first year in Manchester.
But is it all down to luck or could certain things be done differently? United have set to work restructuring the medical department since the appointment of head of sports medicine Gary O’Driscoll. Sources, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationships, believe there have been noticeable improvements since the former Arsenal club doctor’s arrival and that restructuring continues apace.
Ten Hag’s training methods have also come under scrutiny and can be intense, particularly for those not involved in matches, who are put through rigorous sessions the day after games to maintain a consistent level of physical load across the squad. The fast, direct and often chaotic style of play that has been adopted this season also has to be considered as part of that equation.
And when looking at the performances that style of play has produced on a statistical level, United have arguably had their fair share of good fortune to balance out the bad.
Everybody knows by now that United face a lot of shots on goal — 574 in total in the Premier League this season. No top-flight team has faced as many on a per-game basis, but in the context of recent history, that figure only becomes all the more remarkable.
Since 2016-17, eight of the 15 top-flight sides to have faced more shots than United have been relegated. None have finished higher than 15th. At the current rate, United will surpass all of those 15 sides and yet even in the absolute worst-case scenario, they cannot finish any lower than 14th.
Ten Hag has defended United’s apparent willingness to give up shots by arguing they are predominantly low-quality chances and he has a point. The average shot United have faced in the league this season has had a 10 per cent chance of resulting in a goal.
Andre Onana has been busy this season (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Brentford and Newcastle have the worst record in that regard, with the average shot having a 13 per cent chance of being scored. The difference between a 13 per cent and 10 per cent chance is small but significant. A marginal gain, if you like.
But if you concede at least 20 shots a game, as United have regularly been doing of late, and one in every 10 goes in, you’ll need to score three to win. The eighth-worst attack in the league, with only 47 goals in 32 league games, cannot count on that.
United’s 47 goals is level with Luton Town and in line with expected data, too. Defensively, Ten Hag’s side have conceded 48 goals — one of the Premier League’s better records — but from an expected total of 59.8.
Take one away from the other and United’s expected goal difference is -12.2, the fifth-worst in the league. Suddenly, that actual goal difference of -1 does not look so bad after all.
But nothing can change perceptions and narratives around a side like a favourable run of fixtures, in the short term at least, and United now face the Premier League’s bottom two at Old Trafford in the space of four days.
It should not need saying, but United are a better side than both Sheffield United and Burnley by any comprehensive measure. They should not need to get lucky to prove it.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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