“He’s never going to be them. He’s never going to have that gravitas.”
Jamie Carragher has claimed that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer will never be at the level of the Premier League’s world class managers, namely Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel.
In his Telegraph column, the former Liverpool player compared Solskjaer’s fight for supremacy against his rivals with his own battle to play for England, when he was unable to displace Rio Ferdinand or John Terry in the first XI.
“People could say, ‘You weren’t good enough for England’, and I’d agree – I know I wasn’t because John Terry and Rio Ferdinand were better than me,” he wrote.
“The reality is nothing I could do was ever going to supplant the two of them. It’s the same with Solskjaer up against Klopp, Guardiola and Tuchel.”
Carragher went on to say he believes Solskjaer has done a ‘good job’ as United manager, exceeding expectations and getting the team playing more entertaining football than his predecessors, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho.
But he concluded that ultimately, Solskjaer’s ceiling as a manager is well below that of the other managers going for the Premier League title.
“He’s never going to be them,” he explained.
“He’s never going to have that gravitas. He hasn’t got the presence of Klopp at Liverpool, he’s hasn’t got the trophies behind him that Guardiola has at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now Manchester City so that when he speaks the players hang off his every word.”
The Sky Sports pundit also acknowledged that United could well beat Liverpool at Old Trafford later today, with the crowd playing a big part – as they did against Atalanta midweek when United came back to win 3-2.
But “Wednesday still felt like they were papering over the cracks,” he added.
“Whatever the result, though, Solskjaer is not suddenly going to emerge at Klopp’s level. As I know only too well, there’s nothing he can do about that.”
