Why Sir Jim Ratcliffe has surely seen enough of Erik ten Hag at Man United after the episode of Wacky Races at Chelsea, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI

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 to 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 awfully generous number to put on it.

Here’s an interesting statistic: only five teams in the Premier League have conceded more goals after the 75th minute of matches than United’s 14. Seven of the bottom 10 in the table have been sturdier on the stretch.

When we talk about Liverpool, and we will because they face United again on Sunday, we lean into Jurgen Klopp’s description of ‘mentality monsters’. They are — they have scored 26 times in that same window of a game. When the pressure is on, they grow. They find the way that Fergie often found. They found it once more against Sheffield United on the same night Ten Hag’s bunch shrank at Stamford Bridge.

We can distil that into an examination of the parts, which lays out how Klopp has benefited from far smarter recruitment.

But even factoring for our over-inflations of a manager’s value amid a sport of random variables, there are distinct areas that can be coached, conditioned and improved. Closing out a match is one, because that becomes a chat about a squad’s character and a team’s tactics. About a manager’s ability to teach from mistakes.

Where was the evidence of the above when Cole Palmer was left free to collect a short corner immediately before the winner? His shot profited from one of those random variables when it bounced off Scott McTominay. 

But maybe someone from United ought to have gone with Chelsea’s best player. Maybe they ought to have observed the pattern of an entire evening — Chelsea repeatedly sought quick moves from set-pieces. Same goes for picking up on Brentford’s delayed, untracked runs to the area before they conceded to Kristoffer Ajer a few days earlier.

That game was a cracker. So too the Chelsea match. But the latter wasn’t great because of Ten Hag or Mauricio Pochettino; it was a great game in spite of them. It was great because they failed to be great in their coaching. Great coaching stifles and limits the other side; those two served up playground football and Pochettino’s playground football was better.

For Ratcliffe, who watched the chaos first-hand, playground football was not what he invested in. Ainslie spoke about a methodical man who will accept losses if lessons are learned. But lessons stopped being learned under Ten Hag long ago and there was an awful lot of losses to learn from.

Even now he seems to be no closer to figuring out how to coach some consistency into the same players who 13 days apart beat Liverpool and were outmatched in all areas of the pitch by Brentford.

That’s what we mean by ceiling and floor and sporting success relies on it — Scottie Scheffler will go the Masters as favourite because he has the least variance. His worst golf is never that bad. Rory McIlroy, by contrast, seems to have a bit too much United in him. At his best we said the same about Novak Djokovic in tennis as we do about Scheffler.

It’s been a good while since United warranted that kind of status. Sure, they might lift themselves to beat Liverpool again in a season that could also yield an FA Cup victory.

But it is the floor where you find your truest level. It is the floor where you find United’s capitulations against anyone from Galatasaray and Copenhagen to Nottingham Forest and Brentford.

The isolated pockets of promise in between might have bought Ten Hag some benefit of the doubt, but it surely won’t buy him time, because by now Ratcliffe must have seen enough of what happens when he has it. No compass is needed to avoid those rocks.