"It’s football from our day, 20 years ago” - Carragher says Ten Hag’s associate could be the cause of problems with Manchester United
Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher reckons Steve McClaren's influence on Erik ten Hag could be the reason for Manchester United's dated style of play
McClaren served as assistant manager under Sir Alex Ferguson between 1999 and 2001, before returning to Old Trafford to join Ten Hag's coaching staff in May 2022.
Manchester United have already lost 14 games across all competitions this season and have been knocked out of the UEFA Champions League and EFL Cup. However, what has arguably been more concerning for the Old Trafford faithful is a lack of a clear style of play.
Ten Hag has become renowned for regularly changing his tactics to negate his opponent's strengths, resulting in Manchester United never playing the same brand of football. Carragher has suggested McClaren could be behind these decisions. He said (as per METRO):
"Do you think Steve McClaren is an influence? The reason I say that is because, when you talk about the style of play, it’s because it’s probably the style of play that we all played where there was no set thing of doing the same every week."
"We’d do different things every week, sometimes you might go away in Europe and you play counter-attack, or you play a small team at home and you know you’re going to have lots of the ball. United feel a little bit like it’s football from our day, 20 years ago."
He added:
"The first couple of games [under Ten Hag] they played Brighton and Brentford and De Gea was trying to play out and he was struggling with the ball, Eriksen was coming really deep to receive it, he wanted [to sign] Frenkie de Jong who’s like a real footballing midfielder."
"And then he went away from that and had great success last season, great spell, won a cup, got to another cup final, did really well in Europe, got to the quarters."
Carragher continued:
"And I just don’t know if there was something with Steve McClaren being at Manchester United before, being there under Sir Alex Ferguson as well, almost saying, 'This is the way United play' a little bit. I don’t know."
"Sort of counter-attacking, it’s fast and it’s wingers, and they sort of said, 'Well why would we change it because it went quite well last season, let’s maybe try and buy a better calibre of player to continue what we’re doing.'"
Manchester United are currently seventh in the Premier League table with 32 points from 21 games, 13 points behind leaders Liverpool.
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Real Madrid may be tempted to sell Vinicius to fund this move. The 23-year-old left-winger has been in fine form this season, netting nine goals and registering four assists in 17 appearances. While he would be an obvious upgrade over Marcus Rashford, it's unlikely Carlo Ancelotti will want to let go of Vinicius just yet.