IAN LADYMAN: The Manchester United job undresses you, dismantles you and picks you to pieces... and it's happening again
Results got David Moyes sacked at Manchester United almost a decade ago but it was the eyes that had long since given the game away. When you looked at Moyes – on a touchline, in a press conference, on TV interviews – you could see doubt, uncertainty and anxiety staring back.
Moyes was a good manager before that time in his life and has become one once again. But the United job can do that to you. It can undress you, dismantle you and pick you slowly to pieces from the inside. It happened to Moyes and it may well be happening to Erik ten Hag right now.
United’s regression under Ten Hag has been startling this season. His players look like they are riding an elevator with the cables cut. Plunging down to the darkness.
Against Manchester City on Sunday they were bad. We expected that. On Wednesday against Newcastle’s second team in the Carabao Cup they were so wretched I drove home asking myself if I had witnessed anything quite like it in the decade that has followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013.
I remember Moyes watching a shoot-out in the same competition against Sunderland at Old Trafford from a position standing behind his unused players and staff on the touchline. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to watch. United lost.
I remember endless humiliations for men like Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho against Liverpool and City. I remember Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s rabble at Watford. He left the post in tears the very next day.
But there was something almost uniquely feeble and cack-handed about Ten Hag’s United on Wednesday – something so complicit and reeking of self-harm – that it may well have been the worst and if the club’s Dutch manager does not find something within himself to change things soon then he
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