Ashes to Ashworth
On and off the field, United had a weekend to forget. And Jim Ratcliffe is part of the problem
FIVE ASIDES Premier League: United 2, Forest 3
If the Sporting Times still existed, it would be tempting to place an announcement. In affectionate remembrance of Manchester United’s hopes of scraping into the top four this season, which died at Old Trafford on Saturday 7 December. Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowful acquaintances. The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to the club that benefits from United’s ineptness, which may well be Manchester City. It would be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating. The 2024-25 Premier League is wide open, except at the very top: a team can be third without even averaging two points a game. With upsets occurring all over the place, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas by late autumn. If Ruben Amorim had been able to maintain United’s revival under Ruud van Nistelrooy, they would now be in a promising position. Instead, to make it into the top six, let alone think about the top four, they will have to claw back the points they have lost by going on a barnstorming run. It’s not easy to see this happening in their next five league fixtures, which include visits to City and Liverpool.
If you hardly ever win a big game in the Premier League, even the small occasions turn into big ones, because you’re under pressure to cash in on them. United’s meeting with Nottingham Forest, tucked in between trips to the Emirates and the Etihad, simply had to be won. Given that Forest’s bubble had just burst with three defeats in four, it should have been a cruise, like the home games against Leicester and Everton. But then came the storm – the brainstorm that blew in from nowhere and struck Lisandro Martinez and André Onana. Martinez opted to defend a corner by giving a much bigger opponent a lower-back massage. Onana allowed himself to be wrong-footed by a shot that was going straight at him, albeit with a bit of swerve. And then the two of them conspired to do nothing about a loopy header that bobbled in off the far post, supplying its own slow-motion replay. As Gary Lineker spotted on Match of the Day, even the ball turned into a shocked emoji.
In two games with Marcus Rashford starting, Ruben Amorim’s United have scored five goals (three of them by Rashford) and conceded only one. In three games with Rashford on the bench, they have scored five and conceded seven. It’s not just Rashford: every player who has scored has been left out of the next game. So it made a perverse kind of sense for Amorim, as he doodled on his whiteboard ahead of Forest game, to retain the two forwards who had started and failed to score at Arsenal, Rasmus Højlund and Alejandro Garnacho. When they combined to create United’s equaliser, following sharp diagonal passes from Bruno Fernandes and Manuel Ugarte, it looked as if it might work. But then the brainstorms resumed. And it’s hardly surprising to see chaos break out when the manager has spent a month conducting auditions in public. ‘Ruben Amorim is having to do a pre-season during the season,’ one veteran United correspondent said in a tweet. No, he’s not: he’s choosing to do that. Arne Slot arrived at Liverpool, had a pre-season, yet still persisted with the formation he had inherited and gave the style of play no more than a tweak. His team lost at home to Forest too, but then they could afford to.
There may be some method in Amorim’s madness – wanting to give everyone a chance, except, bizarrely, Christian Eriksen – but there is definitely madness in his method. Not one pundit looked at United a month ago and said that what they needed was to switch to three at the back. By changing the formation, Amorim is putting a lot of energy into fixing something that ain’t broke. His personality seems well suited to United, his preferred formation far less so. According to The Guardian, Dan Ashworth, who suddenly found himself in the ejector seat at the weekend, had argued against the change of shape. On the evidence we’ve seen so far, he was right. Kath Phipps, the much-loved receptionist who received a warm tribute before the kick-off, lasted 56 years at United. Ashworth, the so-called sporting director, lasted five months – which was also the length of his gardening leave from Newcastle. You couldn’t make it up,
Jim Ratcliffe is said to have lost patience with one of the ‘best-in-class’ executives he had paid millions to poach. Apparently he found Ashworth irritating, which might be a legitimate reason to lose him if Ratcliffe was a medieval monarch. Sir Jim keeps behaving as if he owns the place when he owns only a quarter of it. And he seems to be going out of his way to make enemies. He has lost the match-going fans by trying to fleece them. He has lost the wheelchair fans by halving United’s subsidy to the Disabled Supporters Association. He has lost the staff at Carrington by making a quarter of them redundant and cancelling the office party. He has made two screeching U-turns, first with Erik ten Hag and now with Ashworth. He has lost the women’s team by saying they’re not a priority. He may well have lost the (male) dressing-room as the players struggle to become acquainted with not just one new Portuguese coach, but six. One of those coaches, Carlos Fernandes, is in charge of set pieces. Anybody know how's that going?
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. If you’re on Bluesky, do follow him.