Two English Premier League football clubs, Manchester United and Chelsea are desperate for glory. The clubs were the dominant teams in the recent past, or to be more precise, during the immediate post Roman Abramovic hpurchase of the latter—when Alex Ferguson, unarguably the most successful manager in the history of the league—insisted on competing against the nouveau richer rival.
Both the teams are coincidentally being managed by one of their legends. The red devils are coached by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, while the London rivals, by their most decorated midfielder in history, Frank Lampard.
Yet, both managers despite exhibiting different managerial philosophies are currently carrying heavy expectations of ushering a regime of instant success by their fans. While the pressure to translate expectations into accomplishment is more underlined in the case of Solskjaer because of the history, size of the club and its vociferous supporters, Lampard’s attempt to do a revolution in North London saw him spend more than 300 million pounds in transfer fees alone. This, no doubt, will pile additional pressure and scrutiny on the young coach to justify the spending spree.
But his counterpart in Manchester is not timid either in the transfer market. The club has parted with a huge amount of cash to purchase Portuguese international, Bruno Fernandez. He was an addition to other two expensive players, Harry Maguire and Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
Despite the spending spree, the two clubs are struggling to vindicate the financial backing they receive from the owners. Of course, there have been grumblings by Man United’s fans, who feel betrayed by the Americans owners. Yet, the truth is that the problem with the team is not the question of whether they have shelled a good amount of cash for new players, but of whether they bought wisely as in the case of their rivals, the Champions, Liverpool Football Club.
Thus, our candidate for the first big casualties this season are Solkjaer and Lampard.
After Chelsea’s elimination from Carobao Cup on Tuesday night, a tweet summed up Lampard’s predicament as: “Zero tactics. Zero philosophy. Zero game plan. Just spending the cash and vibes. Young Sam Allardyce”.
While that’s a bit hyperbolic, Lampard’s team’s insipid performance could not be masked. His inadequacies as a coach are blindingly glaring for all. Now that he’s brought a bunch of new, but expensive additions, is he guaranteed the patience of the billionaire owner to justify the exorbitant expenditure?
And, for how long can Man United’s fans put up with inconsistency of the team under their legend? The season has answers to these posers.
