sport news Why Sir Jim Ratcliffe has surely seen enough of Erik ten Hag at Man United ... trends now

It was during an interview with Sir Ben Ainslie recently that I noticed the compass resting against a wall in his office. It was the INEOS one created by Ainslie’s boss, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and by now you are possibly familiar with its list of terms he likes and those he does not. Erik Ten Hag will be because Ratcliffe distributes them around all his businesses.

Mostly, the compass is a compilation of corporate platitudes. A wheel of blue-sky jargon that we in the media have taken to wheeling out from time to time. And yet it might have registered with Ten Hag that so much of what Ratcliffe loathes is showcased with such regularity by Manchester United.

It must also be a concern that a man who invested in yachting can recognise when a boat has taken on too much water. But before we get to the skipper’s future, let’s stick with the compass a moment.

We can play around a little with ‘moaners’ and ‘quitters’ because United have spent a fortune acquiring those traits. ‘Don’t do dumb s***’ is another that rings bells, as does ‘things that break down’. But if there’s a term among Ratcliffe’s peeves which takes on a sharper edge, it is the gripe he lists first: ‘Making the same mistake twice.’

That really gets to Ratcliffe, riles him according to Ainslie, and it’s the one weighing so heavily against Ten Hag’s position.

If his time does end this summer, you wonder what bearing the past two United games will have had in crystalising a decision that always felt inevitable. Those five points lost in stoppage time against Brentford and Chelsea might just be the final torpedoes in the hull of a manager who, too often, has failed to follow one good step with two of any competence.

It’s about variance and Ten Hag’s inability to reduce the gap between United’s ceiling and floor. It’s about a side whose results are decent — three defeats in 13 games across the competitions in 2024 — but whose performances offer no encouragement that a corner will be turned. It’s about a team that was a vision of courage in beating Liverpool at the death in the FA Cup only for the very same XI to produce one of the meekest showings of recent memory at Brentford.

That they led there was a gift of outrageous good fortune in a game where they cowered; botching the robbery in the 99th minute was the tale of their flakiness. Eight of those players then started the episode of wacky races at Chelsea on Thursday, when their demise came even later and was more pronounced.

If we are to retreat to United’s past, because that is where so many of these conversations seem to go, we would talk about ‘Fergie time’. About finding a way to get a job done. More often than not, the Ten Hag way is to choke. To oversee a collective mentality where no finishing line is too close to rule out a spectacular fall.

Back to that compass — Ratcliffe hates ‘wasting time’. Ten Hag simply hates time. Time introduces a margin for mistakes that will always come around. He wants time, he needs time in the way all struggling managers do, but it is time that kills his team and shows up the failures of his work. Making the same mistake twice? That would be an

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