We just barely had a chance to enjoy a handful of good results, the sensational and highly illogical win over PSG among them, and then... there we go again: ManU tanks in form of a string of loses, with a colossal failure against Everton to crown it all.
Then the question everyone is now inkling to ask of course is whether Ole Gunnar Solskjær is the right man for the job.
Not so long ago everyone was convinced that Jose Mourinho certainly was NOT the right man for the job. And how dare you blame the players for your own shortcomings! Then a while before it was Louis van Gaal, and David Moyes before him, with more or less similar outcomes. Surely no one is nearly as good as the first lover, that being Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson of course. No matter that Mourinho and van Gaal have four Champions League titles among them plus the whole bunch of other successes, while the same Everton has hardly ever recovered after David Moyes's departure. No one is ever going to be as good as our boy!
And no team is ever going to be as great as Manchester United!
Well... no, not true. Other European giants have achieved far greater successes than ManU ever had. Even poor Ajax, a team that the English never regard as a serious force (which we will see about in coming semi-finals) has history of heralding the entirely new era in the World Football, something that ManU had never done. This is a provincial thinking, a homegrown complex of sorts, which actually has a binary nature - one of these two is ever true: either we are the greatest, or we are the worst. Then it leads to assessments that are truly akin to bipolar disorder manifestations - such as the breakout of national pride over the 4th place in the World Cup achieved by the stinkiest national team in 30 years.
Likewise, Sir Alex Ferguson is not the greatest manager in World history! He is one of the greats, that's for sure, but he's no the only one. Sooner the ManU fans and media get over this issue, sooner will the success come.
Which brings us to what I think is the main reason of ManU's lack of excellence as of late - the fans and the media. Because it is the fans and the media who are so quick on the trigger to criticize a manager rather than the players. The first husband syndrome at its strongest!
And the players know it. They know that no matter how they suck, it will be the manager to pay the price, never them. So they can afford to suck. The whole atmosphere is such that allows them to be lazy with from little to no repercussions for them. Then if a manager publicly calls them out on this, what's likely to happen is that the manager is going to be replaced, not them. Because any ManU manager other than Sir Alex can only be a stepfather, never a real father!