The Warm-Up: Ole's Gunnar go
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Updated 02/12/2019 at 09:20 GMT
Who's going to be the next Premier League manager to get the sack?? It's a bleak December morning for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer...
Manchester United's Norwegian manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer gestures as he leaves after the English Premier League football match between Manchester United and Aston Villa
Image credit: Getty Images
MONDAY’S BIG HEADLINES
Ole’s wheely bad
If you hadn’t already discerned via its laboured attempts to shoehorn confusing and outdated pop culture references into its column on a regular basis, The Warm-Up is getting on a bit now. And too old, certainly, to be having an advent calendar.
So instead, every crisp December morning The Warm-Up wakes with a jolt of excitement, bounds through to the living room and excitedly lifts the flap on its laptop to discover which Premier League manager has been sacked. December 1 got us off to such a good start with Quique Sanchez Flores. Thanks, Watford!
Will it be Marco on day two?? Or maybe Ole???? Truly, ‘tis the season for managerial P45s.
Except, well, all is quiet on that front at the moment. Silva is seemingly on the brink at Everton with the club sitting 17th in the table after a gut-wrenching, last-minute, VAR-assisted 2-1 defeat to Leicester on Sunday. That’s now seven defeats in their last 10 games and Everton’s next five are against Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, Leicester and Arsenal. Unless a Christmas miracle occurs, Silva will be binned off quicker than you can say, 'ah, not another Bounty'.
The situation at Old Trafford is rather more perplexing. A 2-2 draw at home against Aston Villa on Sunday leaves United ninth in the table after a paltry four wins from 14 games. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has a worse record this season than Unai Emery did - and most incredibly, since landing the job on a permanent basis his win ratio in the league is a catastrophic 27%. Twenty seven!
Perhaps advisedly, Solskjaer claims he isn't spending too much time looking at the league table at the moment - which has his side 22 points behind Liverpool. He said after the Villa draw:
The league table at this point is not the biggest concern because it is so tight. I wouldn't have sat here and talked about us being fifth if we had got that one goal extra. I just need to make sure that we get three or four performances after each other – and results. What I can say is so far we have had the lead in so many games and we haven't been able to win those games. Six or seven times we've been 1-0 up, or 2-1 or 3-2 like last week. We should be better at seeing those games into wins.
But they aren't, and he isn't. Against a string of supposedly inferior teams, Solskjaer's United have been found lacking. Aston Villa, Sheffield United, Bournemouth, Newcastle, West Ham, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Wolves and even Arsenal have taken points off United in the league this season. Their next two matches are against Tottenham and Manchester City. When does this become unsustainable and unexplainable?
Please release me?
At the top end of the table, following a draw for Manchester City on Saturday, we now find ourselves in the incredible situation that the nearest challengers to Liverpool are *double checks notes* Leicester City.
Admittedly the gap is eight points, but Leicester are absolutely on the kind of form that, were Liverpool not at a historically great level right now, could win them the title. No one is laughing this time at statements of that nature. We know it’s been done before by this team. And the way they scored a late, late winner in a 2-1 win over Everton, only confirmed after a VAR review rejected the linesman’s decision that Kelechi Iheanacho was offside, certainly smacked of a team chasing English football’s biggest prize. As did their joyous celebrations.
Jamie Vardy scored in his sixth game in a row, a nod to his prolific streak which helped Leicester deliver their last title, but there are major differences between this year and 2015-16. The first, and most important, being that while four years ago Leicester benefitted from all the big teams having a shocker, that’s clearly not the case at Liverpool. And the second being the potential issue of losing Brendan Rodgers, who amid interest from Arsenal confirmed reports that he does have a release clause in his contract (reported to be £14m).
“There probably is [a clause] in most manager's contracts. It is all hypothetical," Rodgers told Sky Sports. “My focus is very much with Leicester. I made a change nine months ago and I have been very happy since I came here. We still have a lot of work to do. Most manager's contracts will have something in but my focus is here."
Yeah, just mention that release clause one more time just in case Josh Kroenke didn’t catch it.
It would seem unlikely to leave a job with one team and take one at another, where the first thing you would want to do in an ideal world is buy all the players you were managing the day before in order to replace the feckless misfits you have just inherited. But football has borne witness to more unlikely stories. Like that 5,000-1 title winner a few years back...
New Arsenal, same problems
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Freddie Ljungberg the Arsenal Interim Head Coach during the Premier League match between Norwich City and Arsenal FC at Carrow Road
Image credit: Getty Images
Speaking of those feckless misfits, the scale of the job on Freddie Ljungberg’s hands was made apparent on Sunday as Arsenal could only draw 2-2 at Norwich City in a game which again showcased their boundless capacity for awful defending. It truly is an art form in its own right.
After his splenetic fury was unleashed in midweek following the defeat. At home. To Eintracht Frankfurt. In the Europa League. Which had the saving grace of getting Unai Emery sacked, Martin Keown was close to self-combusting again on live TV as he branded Arsenal’s efforts “embarrassing”.
None of this is on Ljungberg, who has taken temporary charge while Arsenal presumably try and find an available manager in world football who knows how to organise a defence. And he remains optimistic, in public at least, that he can help Arsenal get back in the Champions League this season.
"100 per cent," he said. "Like you see, teams drop points here and there, they drop points, we drop points, Spurs, it’s a bit of a crazy league and of course I hope and think that Arsenal can get back to the top four.
I think when we dominated the game, we had possession, it was not a big problem but we do have a problem on transition and that’s what I’m going to try and fix. We want to be a club which has possession and hopefully when we have the ball, the opponents don’t have the ball and they can’t shoot as much. Normally we say we try in a pre-season when you have them 5, 6 weeks and can normally implement how you want to play football and it is nice but that is not what I have. I will just try to do small building blocks and try to change things.
Just change the defence, Freddie, just change the defence.
IN THE CHANNELS
The ball boy who got a pre, pre assist for Tottenham against Olympiakos in the Champions League last week got to have lunch with all the players, at the behest if manager Jose Mourinho. The cynic in The Warm-Up suggests this is the perfect PR storm for Jose to cook up in order to win over a sceptical fan base. But for now let’s just enjoy this for the wholesome content it is.
HEROES AND ZEROES
Hero: Vivianne Miedema
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Vivianne Miedema of Arsenal celebrates with Lisa Evans of Arsenal after scoring her sides fifth goal during the Barclays FA Women's Super League match between Arsenal and Bristol City
Image credit: Getty Images
The Arsenal striker is one hell of a player and submitted more proof of her greatness on Sunday with a starring role in the 11-1 win over Bristol City on Sunday, which was the biggest victory in WSL history.
Actually, ‘a starring role’ rather undersells the scale of the feat Miedema achieved, as the Dutch star scored SIX and assisted FOUR more in one of the most astonishing individual performances seen in football. Just look at the pass here:
Zero: This guy
COMING UP
The Ballon d’Or is awarded tonight and there are rumours that Lionel Messi might have edged it ahead of Virgil van Dijk, who has had an objectively better 2019 but, well, isn’t the greatest player of all time. We’ll have live coverage throughout the evening as Messi aims to become the first man to win the sport’s most illustrious individual award SIX times.
Oh, and the snooker UK Championship continues in York, watch that live on Eurosport 1 and Eurosport Player from 1pm!
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