Firstly, as many people have said, let’s not make a decision until the end of the season. Let’s see what Ole does first. My stance has always been clear, if he gets us top 3 and a trophy, or if we end the season trophy less again, then top 2, then he should stay. Anything less than that, because we have better squad than Chelsea and Leicester while Pool are having a shocker, then he has to go.
In terms of our points tally, we are making progress considering we have more points now than we had at this stage of last season, and long may that continue. At the same time, he has messed up 4 semi finals. Manchester United should be winning trophies, not becoming nearly men.
He has also been the manager who has best maintained the values of our club, in the sense that he tries his best to play free-flowing football, whether it’s all out attack in some games or counter attack in others. He has also given many youngsters game time. Mourinho would not have given Diallo, Greenwood, Williams etc games. He’d have chucked Fellaini on against Milan, not Diallo.
However, in terms of style of play, we are the exact same team as we have been since Ole came 2 and a quarter years ago.
The best summation I can come up with is that against big sides, our defensive shape is good because we leave more men behind the ball, but against lesser sides, we are more open because we commit more men forwards due to having to win those games, and our press isn’t organised enough to stop those teams from coming out and countering on us. That is why we have this strange trend of conceding more in games against weaker sides. That is a managerial failure. In attack, it can’t be denied that we solely rely on individual quality against every team to win games, in terms of players making good passes, runs and shots. For example, if Poch or Pep was our manager, we would have scored against Chelsea in that counter right at the end, because our players would have been coached in their movements not to make the exact same runs in a straight line.
My conclusion from this is that Ole is a manager who is the perfect example of the phrase ‘a manager is only as good as his players’. He can only improve players through motivation. At Manchester United, he’ll get 2nd or 3rd. At Cardiff, he’ll get 19th or 20th. If we buy someone like Haaland or Sancho, it’ll greatly improve his and our chances of getting 1st, because they have the individual quality to win games on their own.
Essentially, the message that I’m trying to convey that is while Ole in my view has been the best manager we’ve had since Fergie, we can easily improve on him with a top class young manager like Nagelsmann or someone in that vein. And for me, if he doesn’t achieve the aforementioned top 3 and a trophy, that is exactly what we should do. Otherwise, fine, give him a 1 or 2 year contract. It’ll allow us some stability and if he drastically improves, we can give him a new deal, because it can’t be debated that no other even reasonably big club like Sevilla or Arsenal would hire him.