AND SO THE season ends with Erik ten Hag wheeling around to face Jim Ratcliffe: It does feel churlish and faintly grubby to subsume the sheer glory of this FA Cup triumph to the machinations and intrigues of Manchester United Inc; to take the entire point of this pursuit – winning trophies and building memories – and warp it to fit into the endless whirr of speculation about sackings and clear-outs and power games at Old Trafford. If Louis van Gaal was knifed shortly after his FA Cup triumph, it felt like ten Hag was condemned ahead of it, this game functioning as his final meal. But after this afternoon is digested, does United’s manager get a stay of execution? Reports yesterday suggested that United would sack ten Hag regardless of today’s result, but will the living through the result change things? This is why football often resists the clean and cold logic of business: it is not a normal business.
The moments between the meetings keep clouding people’s brain with gorgeous, maddening, seductive, actually-if-you-think-about-it-again . On one level, this was a resolute triumph for Erik ten Hag: the players he has blooded and the system he has drilled was enough to scuttle the most invincible-seeming team in English football history. But on another level, does anything that happened today really change the grander picture? Here United did brilliantly what we have always known they can do well: sit deep and counter with devastation.
Nothing changes the appalling re.