And so here we are again, at that point as the nights draw in and Manchester United prepare to sack a manager. Autumn: season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and a crisis at Old Trafford. Sunday’s 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth, coming on the back of last week’s 4-1 reverse against Como, made clear what many had feared from the moment Michael Carrick was given the job on a permanent basis: that he isn’t up to it.
When you’ve burned through a long list of managers in 13 years, it’s perhaps worth considering whether the manager is really the problem. Could some blame perhaps go to the director of football, Jason Wilcox, or the chief executive, Omar Berrada, the people making the appointments? Or perhaps to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the cost-cutting tax exile and minority shareholder with responsibility for sporting operations?
Or to the Glazer family, who plunged the club into debt with a leveraged buyout in 2005 and have since made calamitous decision after calamitous decision, reducing the most successful club in English league history to a mid-table laughing stock with a roof that leaks symbolically? It’s worth remembering where all this began. The United story has taken on the aspect of a classical tragedy and, like all good tragedies, it begins with a small, seemingly unconnected moment, amplified by pride, that ends up bringing the whole edifice crashing down.
In 1999, Mull of Kintyre, a horse owned by the Irish millionaire John Magnier, won the Gimcrack Stakes at York. Traditionally, the winning owner would give a speech at the Gimcrack Dinner, but Magnier was a shy man who hated public speaking so he asked his friend, the United manager Alex Ferguson, to give the speech on his behalf. The racing establishment, though, refused: it had to be the owner.
To spite them, Magnier named Ferguson as the owner of another horse, Juniper. The following year, Juniper was narrowly beaten in the Gimcrack Stakes. Magnier, though, was determined.
So the year after that, he made Ferguson the owner of Rock of Gibraltar, which had won its first three races. Rock of Gibraltar won the Gimcrack easily and Magnier, waving a metaphorical two fingers at the racing authorities, watched Ferguson give the speech. Magnier was largely making mischief, but he was also happy to do a favor for a friend, to give Ferguson a better experience of racing, and he benefited from the association of the horse with such a famous name.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
