IAN LADYMAN: The Manchester United job undresses you, dismantles you and picks you to pieces… and it’s happening again to Erik ten Hag

The results saw David Moyes sacked from Manchester United almost a decade ago, but it was the eyes that had long given the game away. When you watched Moyes – on the sidelines, in a press conference, during TV interviews – you saw doubt, uncertainty and fear staring back at him.

Moyes was a good manager for that time in his life and has now become one again. But the United job can do that to you. It can undress you, dismantle you and slowly pick you to pieces from the inside. It happened to Moyes and perhaps it is now happening to Erik ten Hag.

United’s decline under Ten Hag this season has been startling. His players look like they’re riding an elevator with the cables cut. Diving into the darkness.

They were bad against Manchester City on Sunday. We expected that. They were so miserable against Newcastle’s second team in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday that I drove home wondering if I had experienced anything like it in the decade that followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement in 2013.

I remember in the same competition against Sunderland at Old Trafford, Moyes watched a shoot-out from a position behind his unused players and staff on the touchline. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to look. United lost.

I remember endless humiliations for men like Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho against Liverpool and City. I remember Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s rabble at Watford. The next day he left the post in tears.

But there was something almost uniquely weak and silly about Ten Hag’s United on Wednesday – something so complicit and smacking of self-harm – that it might have been for the worst and if the club’s Dutch manager doesn’t find something within himself to change Soon he is fired. There’s no doubt about that.

At all clubs there comes a point where absolutely anything or anyone is better than the man in charge, and at Old Trafford that point may well reach a pace that simply didn’t seem possible even a month ago.

I make no apologies for turning this issue around. I have previously been resolute in my support of Ten Hag, citing last season’s progress on the pitch and the decisiveness shown in dealing with Cristiano Ronaldo and Jadon Sancho with clarity and certainty. But things have changed quickly.

Ten Hag looked like a rag thrown away in a storm on Wednesday evening and his post-match offers were no more convincing or credible than his team’s football.

Ten Hag must stay for the time being. Categorically, he should. He deserves the chance to have something approaching his first team on the pitch. Let’s judge him properly when players like Lisandro Martinez, Luke Shaw and Rafael Varane are fit, ready and capable.

But let’s also allow ourselves to look hypothetically at a future where Ten Hag has gone and ask ourselves this question: who on earth would want to come in his place? And why?

It’s hard to believe I’m thinking this, let alone writing it, but Manchester United is now a football club that comes with a health warning. Not only for players, but also for managers.

The playing team is not good enough and, given the age of some, is getting worse and worse. The property is a mess. The Glazers don’t care about football, while Jim Ratcliffe’s new INEOS group will try to take control of football with a 25 percent shareholding. Good luck with that.

The stadium creaks and leaks, while the level of the teams above and around United continues to rise. But against this backdrop and in this context, every United manager is still expected to win the Premier League and play attractive football.

It is almost as impossible a task as any job in top sport at the moment. It is a challenge that simply cannot be met. United are still years away from competing at the top of English and European football. So who would come, apart from the desperate or the purely financially motivated?

No one in football is free from the risk of reputational damage and that is all United have to offer a manager at the moment. Everyone who has come near the place since Ferguson has left with a huge blemish on their resume and things are now arguably worse – more unstable, more toxic – than ever before.

It’s a rather extraordinary state of affairs, summed up quite succinctly and brutally by Arsène Wenger last weekend.

No one in football knows what a good United team looks like better than Wenger. He has suffered through enough of them in the second half of his Arsenal reign.

And this is what he said last weekend. ‘I feel sorry for United because there is no hope in the team. I don’t see where they can improve. This team has lost confidence, quality and spirit.’

Each of these words will have been felt like a dagger by those who hold United close to their hearts. Sympathy from Arsène Wenger. What now? A bouquet of flowers from Jurgen Klopp?

But this is what Old Trafford has become. A pity palace. No manager in their right mind would come close to that.

Drinking water pulls back the ugly curtain of football

Buried in the endless stream of self-pity that made up much of Jake Humphrey’s indispensable interview with Danny Drinkwater on the High Performance podcast was a sentence that told us a lot about the deep-seated misogyny that lives and breathes in football locker rooms.

“I would go out drinking and take every bird I could,” Drinkwater said of his difficult time at Chelsea.

English football likes to tell itself that it has changed, and in some ways it has. But here at Drinkwater, the caveman’s language was a little peek behind the curtain.

It’s ugly, isn’t it?

Rice boo boys should feel crazy

Tribalism is part of football. It is important. But so does respect, gratitude and understanding.

With that in mind, the West Ham fans who booed Declan Rice when he returned to Arsenal on Wednesday should reflect on where he came from, what he contributed and how much money he brought them with him when he left.

And then they should just feel a little stupid.

Plucky Port Vale gives us hope

I used to work as a news reporter in Stoke-on Trent and watch football in Port Vale.

I was there with 18,600 others in September 1994 when ‘the Vale’ hosted Manchester United in the Coca-Cola Cup. United had a few young lads making their first starts for the club. Their names were Beckham and Scholes. I probably should have kept the program.

Vale lost that but traveled up for a while under the shrewd management of John Rudge. Good football was played on a large field. They called it the Wembley of the North, which was probably a stretch.

Anyway, Vale has been struggling for many years, but here they are about to have their moment in the sun again. They will host Middlesbrough in the last eight of the Carabao Cup and if the League One club can win that, who knows what awaits them in the semi-finals.

They say this competition doesn’t matter. They say no one cares. Yet the Newcastle players taking selfies at Old Trafford on Wednesday care. This also applies to the West Ham fans who left the London Stadium after their victory over Arsenal.

So to Port Vale and to what I still call the League Cup. The big clubs will eventually get us all. They will pressure this competition until it dies.

But as long as there is still life, it will give us stories of hope and rejuvenation. Middlesbrough’s Michael Carrick will no doubt not enjoy his assignment at the Potteries in December, but he would have loved to have played on that pitch…