Making Manchester United Again

#sorrynotsorry

I wanted to write this post a week or so ago, when Manchester United put us all out of our collective misery and fired Jose Mourinho, but now that we've seen how United's done under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as interim manager, I have a little more information to work with. And after watching them demolish Bournemouth this morning, it's fair to say that the change in management has perked the team up significantly.

I've long been ambivalent about Mourinho. He obviously led Chelsea to their greatest period of success back in the last decade, and before that, at Porto, claimed the last Champions League title for a team outside the Big Four countries in 2004. But his teams are frequently boring, and he's long had a knack for making great players look ordinary. Add to that his tendency to flame out in his third season at any club, and he looks more like an expensive gamble than a real option for a club to regain its former glory.

And maybe it's only that I've paid a lot more attention to him the past few years, because I've been playing Fantasy Premier League during that time, but he's also seemed worse this time around. His first season at United doesn't bring up any particular memories, but last season he kicked up his feuds with his own players, such that it was surprising to see how well Paul Pogba played in winning the World Cup this summer. And the start of this season saw him kick that feuding into high gear, even stripping Pogba of the captaincy and benching him completely for the last couple of games before he got the sack.

But then he was gone. The most mystifying thing for me was how much I cared - Manchester United has been one of the teams I've most loved to hate since about 1999, when they knocked Juventus out of the Champions League and then snatched it dramatically in the last five minutes of the final against Bayern Munich. Yet, oddly, seeing Mourinho go filled me with a weird excitement, a need to see what happened next and whether it meant United would finally challenge for the title again.

(Although there was also a perverse desire to see just how bad things could get - at some point would even United get relegated?)

That excitement rose when they announced that they'd be hiring Solskjaer as their interim manager for the rest of the season. Solskjaer obviously is the guy who scored the winning goal in that 1999 Champions League final, and despite not being associated with the club in the same way as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes, is legitimately a club legend. He's even 45, the exact same age as Alex Ferguson when he took over in 1986, though I'll admit that's stretching analogies a bit too far - Ferguson had already had a certain amount of success as a manager in Scotland before getting the United job, whereas Solskjaer's previous managerial experience in the Premier League was an ill-starred stint where he took Cardiff City down to relegation.

And yet, as of today he's now overseen three successive wins in his first three games, something only Matt Busby and Jose Mourinho himself achieved. The other number people have been throwing around is the five goals his United team scored against Cardiff in his first game in charge - since that was the first time United had scored five in one match since Ferguson's last game in charge in 2013.

Generally it's not good to draw too many conclusions from this run, since these three matches have all been against decidedly weaker teams, two of whom were promoted in the last two years, and all of whom are in decidedly poor runs of form at the moment. In addition, Man United line up next against Newcastle United, who are also in their own difficulties at the moment, so Solskjaer's skills won't be properly tested against a top 6 side (Spurs) until 13 January.

But I come once again to the game I was watching this morning. United looked fluid, free-flowing, deadly - stringing together passes and rushing into danger areas where they were well placed to score against Bournemouth. Pogba was particularly deadly, pulling back the first two goals and creating another later on. Whatever Solskjaer's skills as a coach or the hands-on-ness of his approach, the evidence is right there in performances against opposition that the Mourinho team would have struggled against. It's also hard not to assume that he's trying to stamp on this United team the style of football he learned under Ferguson.

The other question is what happens at the end of the season. If Solskjaer continues like this, he'll surely be in the running for the job on a permanent basis, with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino the other likely candidate (unless he gets lured away to Real Madrid, who are also looking for a permanent coach but haven't made as charmed an appointment). It'd be interesting to see, if Solskjaer does get the job, what he'll be able to make of it, and whether this really does herald a change in fortunes for the team, rather than a dead-cat bounce.

This all brings us back to the question of why I care so much. As I mentioned, United has long been the team I loved to hate. They almost always got the players that helped put them head and shoulders above the competition, including a very young Cristiano Ronaldo, and they had the swagger and arrogance that came with dominating the game throughout the 1990s.

But I suspect my current nostalgia for the 90s is what's behind my excitement - Solskjaer is part of the team that I learned about when I first got into football, which is also when the UK in general, and Manchester in particular, was the cultural epicenter of everything I was into. Seeing them come back into that kind of form would be a nice throwback to days that were, if not happier, then not as marked by darkness (as evidenced by the title I came up with for this post).

When United was winning everything in sight, we were still years off from invasions of Iraq, wars on terror and rising xenophobia. Not to mention that the UK didn't seem likely to ditch the EU anytime soon, even if they did complain about it a whole lot.

In any case, it'll be fun to watch how United develops under Solskjaer. In particular, it'll be interesting to see whether Pogba's run of form continues, given the promise that attached itself to him with his £89 million price tag when United bought him from Juventus (and, um, when he won the fucking World Cup). United may not have the best team, but in Pogba it may have the best player, Mohamed Salah notwithstanding.

So for the first time in twenty years, and with shame in my heart, I think I may find myself rooting for Manchester United soon...