Erik ten Hag faces tough task to turn Manchester United’s ghost ship around

Welcome to Manchester, Erik. We’ve been expecting you. Here it comes at last, the latest rummage, the latest mystery gift from the Manchester United managerial lucky dip.

There is a game you can play with the managerial appointments of the post-Ferguson years. This is an appointment process so refined it has, to date, dished up five random, ill-fitting, hilariously oscillating selections in the course of the past decade.

At the end of which the fascination is not so much what the latest hopeful can do with Manchester United, but what Manchester United is going to do to him, what quality, what weakness, what blind spots will be picked out and magnified in that hard white light into something monstrous and cartoon-like.

David Moyes, who came in a little above his level, was recast by eight months in the job as a total imposter, some hollow-eyed passer-by with an empty briefcase on his desk. Ole Gunnar Solskjær, always a company hire, was transformed into a fawning yes-man, a gargoyle of the Old Trafford waxwork museum.

Ralf Rangnick’s weakness was always likely to be his remoteness. Processed through the Old Trafford hall of mirrors Rangnick has become a kind of footballing martian, a baffled-looking time traveller, the world’s worst star of Doctor Who. Everyone has a plan until they’re made Manchester United manager. What will it do to Ten Hag? And yet there is also hope. This is by any reasonable standard a sensible appointment. Ten Hag is a talented coach and a man of substance.

For the first time since Alex Ferguson back in 1986 Manchester United have sourced a manager who is qualified on his record but also still on the rise in his own career. Ten Hag is agreeably serious. He has good influences. He seems state of the