Ten Hag will 'pay the price' for 'League Two' display vs Spurs as Sharpe makes Ancelotti claim

Former Manchester United midfielder Lee Sharpe believes Erik ten Hag may have run out of lives at Old Trafford, after claiming his team looked like a lower league team as they were hammered by Tottenham at Old Trafford last Sunday.

A thumping 3-0 win for Spurs has piled the pressure on United’s beleaguered manager Ten Hag, who appears to be on the brink of the sack once again after being given a stay of sporting execution after the club spoke to other managers as they considered a change last summer.

Now Sharpe, who won three Premier League titles during his time at Man Utd, has served up a withering view of Ten Hag’s reign, as he suggested his tactical naivety is being exposed time and again.

“They looked like a League One or League Two team against Spurs and in the end, the manager will always pay the price for that,” Sharpe told Football365 with NewBettingSites.uk.

“They just looked like they had no plan, they gave the ball away sloppily, they got bullied off the ball and tactically they were outdone far too easily.

“You start the season saying they are looking at the top four and challenging for trophies, but they were nowhere near that against Spurs and haven’t been for most of games this season and for the last couple of years.

“I know we’re only six games into the season so it’s really early, but it just seems like the exact same issues and same problems from three seasons ago or two seasons ago are still occurring and it’s not been put right, so where does the buck lie?

“I don’t know if the players are not good enough, but they don’t seem to be responding to what he’s trying to tell him.

“We don’t know what’s going on in the training ground, but it’s blatantly he obviously that full-backs are pushing on too early before we’ve got good possession. There are many individual errors, we are not scoring enough goals, are allowing too many chances to be created against us and just too wide open.

“Sometimes Ten Hag picks the wrong the wrong team, the wrong starting 11 and then makes the wrong subs, so it’s all a bit of a mess.

“I know Steve McClaren (Ten Hag’s former assistant at United) has come out and said he sees things in a game that others don’t, but I wonder whether he is seeing things in a game no one else does because this isn’t working out. We have no idea what he’s seeing.”

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Sharpe believes the move from United’s owners to speak to potential successors to Ten Hag while the Dutchman awaited his fate last summer was a mistake that exposed their own lack of knowledge of the game.

Jim Ratcliffe and his new football management set-up came into Old Trafford at the start of the year vowing to build a structure for success, but Sharpe argues their early moves have exposed their lack of knowledge of the elite end of the game.

“I think it was weird and a bit bizarre that they admitted they were talking to the managers when they had one in place,” added Sharpe. “It was inevitable that news would leak out, so why did they do it.

“It was always 50-50 at the back end of last season whether they sacked him or not and I was an advocate of him staying because I thought a bit of continuity and a bit of time might do him well, but it’s hard now.

“Does changing a manager work now? If you bring a worldie of a manager in there like Carlo Ancelotti, how does he massively change what’s going on?

“Defensively we could be more sound and even if the stats say they have created the most big chances in the league, they haven’t scored enough of them.

“I thought they should have done and signed another goal scorer in the summer, so you are relying on one centre-forward who had been out injured in Rasmus Hojlund.

“For me, the only positive that that came out of the last weekend was the performance of the goalkeeper, Andre Onana.

“He has taken a lot of flack and a lot of abuse since day one at Manchester United and to be fair to him, he came up he came out shining more than anybody else which he’s not odd on a day like that.

“Without the keeper, it could have been a six or seven-goal defeat and that would almost certainly have been the end for the manager there and then.”

Man Utd boss Ten Hag looks set to stay in his role heading into Thursday’s Europa League tie against Porto, but another big defeat in Portugal could be the final nail in his Old Trafford story.

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