The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 11
got. Leicester City knocked United out
of the FA Cup, while in the Premier
League they were overhauled by City.
Finishing second equalled the club’s
best post-Fergie performance,
though, and in the Europa League
final in Gdansk the stage was set for
Solskjaer to cement himself with a
first trophy.
It proved a dispiriting anti-climax.
United’s players were lacklustre and
Solskjaer struggled with the tactics of
Villarreal’s Unai Emery, failing to
make a substitution until the 100th
minute. Defeat came after a marathon
penalty shoot-out. The lobby who
always doubted Solskjaer’s creden-
tials to be an elite club manager took
that final as proof he would always fall
short at the highest level, and certain
players shared those doubts. Wood-
ward, determined to belatedly repli-
cate the loyalty United once showed
Ferguson, rewarded Solskjaer with
another three-year contract.
There were still plenty of Solskjaer
believers, not least that punditocracy
of former United players, and after a
summer of stellar signings — Jadon
Sancho, Raphaël Varane and Cristiano
Ronaldo — those pundits predicted
2021-22 would be the season United
finally challenged for the title again.
And yet Solskjaer lasted only 12
more league games. His dismissal
followed a wretched 4-1 defeat away to
Watford, which was preceded by
eviscerations at Old Trafford by
Liverpool and City. On that final day
at Vicarage Road, Woodward and
his soon-to-be-successor, Richard
Arnold, stayed away — talks with
agents about potential replacements
for Solskjaer were said to have been
going on for several weeks.
Barely 90 minutes had passed since
the final whistle at Watford and The
Sunday Times was able to break the
news that a board meeting was being
held to discuss the manager’s
dismissal. Officially sacked the next
morning, but keen to communicate
with supporters until the last,
Solskjaer gave a tearful exit interview
with club media.
How had it gone so wrong, so
quickly? Solskjaer, the ultimate club
loyalist, may for ever keep his counsel
on events. However, a well-placed
source suggests he regretted sanction-
ing the Ronaldo signing — which had
been a club idea, and did not fit with
what he was trying to build.
Sir Alex Ferguson (2004-05 - 2012-13) Past nine seasons (2013-14 - 2021-22)
Manchester United in the Champions League
2004-05 Round of 16
2005-06 Group stage
2006-07 Semi-final
2007-08 Champions
2008-09 Runners-up
2009-10 Quarter-final
2010-11 Runners-up
2011-12 Group stage
2012-13 Round of 16
2013-14 Quarter-final
2014-15 DNQ
2015-16 Group stage
2016-17 DNQ
2017-18 Round of 16
2018-19 Quarter-final
2019-20 DNQ
2020-21 Group stage
2021-22 Round of 16
O
ne month into Rangnick’s
interim tenure, there came a
message from a source closely
acquainted with the environ-
ment that Solskjaer had needed every
ounce of his decency and bonhomie
to handle. Results were going OK for
Rangnick, but he was already deeply
disquieted by performances, the
dressing room culture, the deficits in
United’s squad and the sheer amount
of noise that raged around the club.
To an observation that Rangnick
had not taken long to run into the
same issues as Solskjaer, the source
replied: “It will get worse.”
Rangnick arrived with fierce
standards and a reputation in football
for club building — but the sheer feck-
lessness, soullessness and shameless-
ness of certain elements in the United
dressing room shocked him.
“We can only apologise to the sup-
porters. It was a terrible performance
and a humiliating defeat,” he said
after a 4-0 defeat by Brighton on May- Two weeks later he spoke of how he
had been unable to get the team to
adapt to the pressing game plan that
was his speciality and which many
thought they needed to embrace.
“We just realised that it was diffi-
cult,” Rangnick said. “We had no pre-
season, we couldn’t really physically
develop and raise the level.”
Rangnick chose not to go into speci-
fics but he could have mentioned: the
player who went Awol from training,
returned with profuse apologies, then
skipped practice again citing a per-
sonal crisis; the player briefing against
the club captain, Maguire; the player
who continually declared himself
unfit to play on the eve of games; the
player the coach just could not get
through to, because he was so with-
drawn; and the player who stood on
the burning deck declaring that train-
ing should just be fun.
Now the “chosen one” is Ten Hag,
and United are trying to learn from
the past with the Dutchman joining
the day after the club’s 2021-22 season
ended, and getting to work on trans-
fers straightaway. Asked about Van
Gaal’s ‘commercial club’ criticism ten
Hag said “I spoke with the directors.
Football is one, two and three at this
club and every club these days is com-
mercial. Every club needs the reve-
nues to be at the top...but football is
one, two, three at this club.”.
As he strode on to the stage, grin-
ning, to collect the LMA’s manager of
the year award the night after ten Hag
was unveiled, Jürgen Klopp did not
look like a man who rued not being in
charge of the “adult Disneyland”.
Leave someone else to all that Mickey
Mouse jazz.
“This is agony,” Sir Alex Ferguson
said as he presented Klopp with his
honour. “Absolute agony.”
Additional reporting: Duncan Castles
‘My daughter would
play with me and I
felt scared, scared
of being hurt. She’d
run at me and I’d
cower away’
Matthew Wilkes has thought it
through. What to say, what to do, if
he breaks down at work. “It would be
the world’s biggest story, without
having any background to it, if an
assistant starts crying in a Premier
League game, know what I mean? So
I’ve rehearsed things,” Wilkes says,
with startling honesty.
Match officials are already targets
enough for abuse and comments, so
why on earth is Wilkes willing to risk
opening up this way?
Because he’s not doing this for
himself. “Maybe someone will hear
my story and instead of texting the
old, ‘Let me know if you need
anything’ — which people never
really mean — they’ll actually pick
up the phone. They’ll check in
with that person,” he says. “Coming
from teaching, I just want to help
someone else.”
Wilkes is one of England’s leading
assistant referees and on Sunday ran
the line for Brighton & Hove Albion v
West Ham United. The story that,
bravely, he is determined to tell is
perhaps best begun at the FA Cup
final in 2019, where he acted as
assistant referee. Manchester City
outclassed Watford, 6-0, but that
didn’t matter. “Walking out in front
of 85,000 people... as a ref it’s your
pinnacle. You only do [an FA Cup
final] once,” Wilkes says.
Wilkes started the next season
with a new goal — to become a regular
on the Uefa match list — but did not
feel at his best in the early games.
By November he found himself
struggling to shake off what he
thought was a chest infection. He did
Burnley v West Ham and “felt a bit
rotten”, so finally saw a doctor, who
sent him for a precautionary x-ray.
His next game was Crystal Palace v
Liverpool; a good day. Wilfried Zaha
scored a brilliant goal and celebrated
right in front of him. He still has the
picture. On the Monday, he did a
Professional Game Match Officials
Limited (PGMOL) training camp and
on Tuesday evening was at home,
while his wife, Hayley, went for a
walk with their three-year-old
daughter, Connie. His mum and his
dad, Pete, were round to put up a
bunk bed. “I’m useless,” says Wilkes,
a PE teacher before full-time
refereeing, “when it comes to DIY.”
His phone went. The doctor. “Have
you had a letter?” she asked, and he
said no. He’ll never forget her next
word: “Oh.” The x-ray had identified
a lump on his chest, and she outlined
four possibilities: the lump was
benign, signified prostate cancer,
lung cancer, or Hodgkin lymphoma.
The next month was a whirl of
blood tests, scans and biopsies.
December 23 brought good news —
contrary to doctors’ initial
suspicions, it was not lung cancer.
But on Christmas Eve came the
diagnosis: Hodgkin lymphoma, a
type of blood cancer.
Wilkes did not want to spoil
anyone’s Christmas, so only told
Hayley and his parents and was even
on assistant VAR duties at Stockley‘I sat on bed and cried night
before I ran line at Brighton’
Jonathan Northcroft
Zaha enjoys
his goal
in front of
Wilkes at
Selhurst Park
in November
2019, only
weeks before
the official
had Hodgkin
lymphoma
diagnosedPark over the festive period. On
December 31, a final scan confirmed
the diagnosis and on New Year’s Day
he began chemotherapy. “I was 34
and remember the consultant — an
Everton fan — saying, ‘You’re classed
as a young person,’ and handing me a
leaflet. The leaflet was all stuff like,
‘How to talk to your college lecturers
about your cancer.’ Even now,”
Wilkes says, “it all feels surreal.
“My wife Hayley always wanted
three children. We’re on one and a
dog. A possible side effect of chemo
was we wouldn’t have any more kids
and I’d booked in at a clinic [to give a
sperm sample] but needed an
echocardiogram before starting the
chemo. There wasn’t time for both
appointments without delaying my
treatment.” Hayley told him to go to
the echocardiogram.
Halfway through his chemo came
the Covid lockdown. On Friday of its
first week, Mum and Dad brought
groceries round. They stood on the
driveway and said a quick socially
distanced hello. Wilkes never saw his
dad again. Four days later, on March
31, Pete suffered a heart attack at
home. The details haunt Wilkes: the
call from his mum at 9.20pm, her
forbidding him to come round, not
being able to go to his dad in hospital,
the subsequent call from his mum
saying Pete had died. The image of
her, alone in grief, sitting in a chair in
the hall while a neighbour checked
on her through the porch window.
Wilkes’s cancer put him at high
risk during the pandemic and it
would be June 13 — Connie’s fourth
birthday — before he saw his mum
face-to-face. “We never had a funeral
for Dad, never even a get-together.”
After finishing chemo, he had amonth’s wait before a short course of
radiotherapy, “and I suppose, at
some point during that time, I just
broke down,” Wilkes says.
“The hardest bit — and this is why
I want to do this story — is I was
embarrassed. Because of the male,
macho ego thing. It started coming:
anxiety. My daughter would play with
me and I felt scared, scared of being
hurt. She’d run at me and I’d cower
away. I couldn’t sleep. By then I was
in a sofa bed downstairs so Hayley
and Connie wouldn’t be disturbed
and I watched the sun come up more
times than I want to remember.
“I’d wake up and just cry, and
wouldn’t tell my wife. She was
holding it together for the little one,
and the last thing she needs is me
saying, ‘I’ve cried again.’ At times of
an evening we’d sit and she’d look at
me and cry and I’d cry with her.”
Now he is one of the PGMOL’s
mental health champions and one of
the groups he would like his story to
help is a cohort of young Midlands
officials he is mentoring. Through
example, he shows that with courage,
and talking, it is possible to climb
back up when you go “down that hill”
of dwindling mental health. But you
cannot do it by yourself.
On February 26 this year, Wilkes
returned to Premier League
officiating. The night before, he sat on
the edge of his bed in the Holiday Inn,
Brighton, in tears, with his phone.
“I was probably a bit of a mess,”
he says. “I wanted to text people to
say thank you and cried every time.
I texted Friendy [Premier League
referee and close pal Kevin Friend],
Marc [Perry, a fellow assistant and
another close friend], Tom Harty
[also an assistant], Martin Atkinson,
Francis [his sports scientist].
“I never texted my mum or wife —
that would have been the end of
me. The texts were paragraphs, I
suppose, to say this is what you did
for me, so thank you.
“And I think, like now, I get upset —
not because it reminds me of what
I’ve been through, but because I’m
embarrassed how much people had
to help me. Maybe not embarrassed.
Humbled is the word.”FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCKIN TOMORROW’S
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THE FALL AND FALL OF MAN
UTD PT II: THE PLAYERS