United are so bad, McLean’s statue will be boiling with rage

THERE’S an image of the late, incomparable Jim McLean which lingers long in the mind. The year is 1984, the venue the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. Dundee United have just lost 3-0 to Roma and a group of Italian players, eyes burning with vengeance, converge on the touchline to confront United’s chastened manager.

Covered in human spit, McLean is shadowed by assistant Walter Smith as Roma defender Agostino Di Bartolomei raises his middle finger aloft.

What set that picture apart was not just the animalistic behaviour of players from an Italian side eventually found guilty of bribing French referee Michel Vautrot. It was the photographic evidence it provided of Dundee United contesting the semi-finals of the European Cup. By the standards of today, it’s staggering.

The club eventually commissioned a Jim McLean statue outside Tannadice. And you can only hope someone stuck a thermometer in the sculpture’s mouth after Wednesday’s loss to Kilmarnock.

A hapless defeat rendered relegation a formality, the performance so poor the bronze McLean must have been boiling with rage. A driven perfectionist, Wee Jim famously fined his players for failing to entertain fans during a 5-4 aggregate win over French aristocrats Monaco in the UEFA Cup.

He didn’t live long enough to witness the 7-0 defeat to AZ Alkmaar which triggered this season’s calamitous decline. Had the team he managed suffered a defeat of that magnitude, the players would have spent the rest of the season living on rice and beans and sleeping in cardboard boxes under the Tay Bridge.

A tactical genius, a force of nature, there were no shortage of things which kept United’s tortured genius awake at night. One thing he never lost any sleep over was the fear of relegation. Or the threat of a P45.

You couldn’t say the same of Dundee United managers now. Where McLean ruled the roost for 22 years, Jack Ross lasted just ten weeks.

After losing seven goals to AZ, a 9-0 home defeat to Celtic was a humiliation too far. Replacement Liam Fox lasted six months as the team’s slump to the foot

Fury: McLean and Smith are targeted by Di Bartolomei and his Roma team-mates at the Stadio Olimpico in 1984

of the table ended his tenure. Given 12 games to stop the rot, Jim Goodwin had more chance of bringing an end to global warming.

Since buying the club in 2018, American Mark Ogren has ploughed in around £13million of his own money. Managerial pay-offs have become an expensive and damaging habit. And when relegation is confirmed tomorrow, United will be left with a squad of players earning salaries they couldn’t sustain in the Premiership, never mind the Championship.

Rumours of Steven Fletcher trousering £7k a week are described as an exaggeration by those with knowledge of the facts and figures. Even so, it’s difficult to swallow the idea that Dylan Levitt would have moved north from Manchester United for buttons. Tony Watt, meanwhile, left Motherwell for three times more money — then spent the second half of the season on loan at St Mirren.

Back in the days of incentive-based pay, McLean used to compare Tannadice to a corner shop. These days, the emporium is haemorrhaging cash and goodwill faster than the John Lewis Partnership.

Accused of playing fantasy football with Ogren’s personal fortune, sporting director Tony Asghar would eventually carry the can for the club’s plight. While Asghar wouldn’t claim to have got every big call right, ultimate responsibility has to lie with the man who actually owns the club. And in

January, United’s chairman was relaxed, almost blasé, over the prospect of going down. ‘It is not the end of the world if we get relegated,’ Ogren told shareholders at the AGM, ‘We will come straight back up.’ That’s an easy thing to say. Hard evidence shows it’s a much harder thing to actually do. When United were relegated to the Championship in 2016, it took four years to return to the Premiership. And another prolonged stay in the second tier would place further strain on the club’s finances. In the last accounts, the wage bill was an eye-watering £5.9m a year. Unless they can source clubs willing to take the high earners off their hands this summer, United’s wage bill will be unsustainable in the second tier. It’s not even clear that they took the precaution of writing salaryreduction clauses into the contracts in the event of relegation. Goodwin wants an opportunity to piece a shattered dressing room back together and lead them back to the top flight at the first time of asking. If he does that with a bruised and tarnished group of players, the Irishman deserves his own statue alongside the bronze Jim McLean.