West Ham vs Manchester United: Julen Lopetegui and Erik ten Hag look to heal wounds in Premier League clash

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Evening Standard

·27 October 2024

West Ham vs Manchester United: Julen Lopetegui and Erik ten Hag look to heal wounds in Premier League clash

Both managers under pressure after difficult starts to the season

Free from the pressure-cooker environment of sitting in the top job, David Moyes must look on at the situations Erik ten Hag and Julen Lopetegui find themselves in and feel more than a dash of relief at no longer being head coach of either Manchester United or West Ham.

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A meeting between the two sides at the London Stadium on Sunday will, more precisely, be a battle between two of the Premier League’s most under-pressure managers.

If the threat of a sacking is more pronounced for the Dutchman than for Lopetegui, then that is only because of how much longer Ten Hag has been in post. West Ham have won just two of eight league matches under their new manager.

Chairman David Sullivan’s decision this summer to hire a head coach of as much renown as Lopetegui to replace Moyes was born of the club’s ambition to kick on after three successive seasons in Europe spent pushing England’s top clubs in the league but with a style of play sometimes deemed risk-averse and, at its most criticised, backward.

Perhaps most troubling of all for Hammers fans, then, is how devoid of clear strategy the team has looked in the early months of Lopetegui’s regime. A new-look back four has consistency only in so far as the four players are the same each week. The compliments must stop there, because some utterly dismal goals have been shipped. Alphonse Areola’s own goal against Tottenham after a defensive mix-up with new signing Jean-Clair Todibo is the obvious example.

What will make supporters especially queasy about the club’s defensive ills is that Lopetegui built his reputation in Spain on being a defensively minded pragmatist, keen to develop attacking patterns only upon the pillars of a solid defensive base. Right now, West Ham can lay claim to having neither.

And hopes of turning that around were severely hit late on against Spurs last weekend, because Mohammed Kudus’s needless hit-out at Micky van de Ven now sees him suspended for a month, depriving his team of their most mercurial player — and, on his day, their best.

West Ham will be without Mohammed Kudus for their clash with Manchester United

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It feels an awfully long time ago now that Moyes’s West Ham prevailed 2-0 against Ten Hag’s United thanks to goals from Kudus and Jarrod Bowen in this fixture last Christmas. Wham. Ten months on and they have fallen far.

Since talk began swirling through the usual avenues that, after last month’s 3-0 home defeat to Spurs, United could sack Ten Hag if they lost to both Porto and Aston Villa, the Red Devils are unbeaten in four matches.

That, however, tells only half the story. Three of those have been draws, including Thursday’s 1-1 draw against Fenerbahce and former manager Jose Mourinho. United have now gone an entire year without winning in Europe, and they still occupy the bottom half of the Premier League table with just three wins from eight games and a measly seven goals along the way.

If psychodrama and circus were not so inextricably linked with Manchester United, it could reasonably be said that they are the most boring team in the league. Instead, their history, their riches, their ambitions to return to the head of the top table mark this as another season already gone pear-shaped — and see Ten Hag clinging to his job.

Victory at the London Stadium would cure the scrutiny for neither manager; things have gone too badly wrong for that. But it wouldn’t half help to heal the wounds.