Collymore says players did club proud

In his exclusive column for CaughtOffside, former Aston Villa attacker Stan Collymore discusses some of football’s biggest talking points, including why he got it wrong about the FA Cup Final, why Enzo Maresca isn’t the right man for Chelsea, why Jadon Sancho should steer clear of Man United and much more. 

Buy Last Minute Tickets to the UEFA Champions League Final!

—

Man United players did the club proud… and I got it completely wrong

I genuinly couldn’t see how Man United could win that FA Cup final. It was fertile ground for Man City. Premier League Champions, no Champions League final to worry about, nice and relaxed and ready to go out and play a team that was fractured and not playing well.

I should’ve known better really.

Whatever vintage it is, Man United (or Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona for that matter) manage to compete.

I was genuinely shocked because I thought that they would play within within themselves. I didn’t expect them to come out and be like ‘okay, we’ll have a really good go at this’ because I haven’t seen enough big characters or enough personalities in the dressing room throughout the season to suggest that this would be the case. Secondly, obviously with it being a derby game, they showed up to that as well.

I’m more than happy to hold my hand up and say that I got it completely wrong and I thought that they did the club proud.

The performance was a massive positive for Erik ten Hag too so what does that mean for him? He was obviously very bullish and said ‘if United don’t want me then I’ll go and win trophies elsewhere,’ but that’s a bit rich really because he’s only been in Holland before United so he’s not exactly won the Champions League.

I think that if you asked me who would do a better job with the youngsters and the seniors at Manchester United, Mauricio Pochettino or Erik ten Hag, I’d go for Pochettino every day of the week and twice on a Sunday.

It’s great that ten Hag managed to get the players to go out and play for the shirts because that’s always important for Manchester United fans, but I think that there will be an element of dropping the ball if Sir Jim Ratcliffe, INEOS and Sir Dave Brailsford all of a sudden now thought that one performance meant ten Hag was the right man to lead the charge towards a title tilt.

There was nothing in Manchester United’s league season to suggest that Erik ten Hag had control of the dressing room in the way that he did…