“Gunning for Glory”: The forgotten documentary about Solskjaer at Molde
“My dream one day is to manage Manchester United”
The opening seconds are quite comical.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, in a slightly oversized blazer and a shirt with a hugely oversized collar, stands in the middle of the pitch at Molde’s Aker Stadium.
He looks like a fish out of water, like a school child who has accidentally wandered into the wrong classroom and now feels too awkward to leave.
This is how the 2011 documentary “Ole: Gunning for Glory” begins, a documentary produced for MUTV that follows the Norwegian at the end of his first year in management.
Whilst that first scene makes Ole seem out of his comfort zone, the facts prove the reality was quite the opposite. That season, Solskjaer led Molde to their first ever league title in their centenary year. He would go on to retain the title in 2012, before winning the cup in his third season.
Available online in four parts on YouTube, this near-decade old documentary offers valuable lessons from the past about Solskjaer as the Manchester United manager today. In paticular, it answers contemportary questions about Ole’s style of play, style of management and his unique connection United.
“I enjoy sitting and watching our players, playing the football I’ve always wanted to see”
The documentary spends a lot of time exploring the tactical changes Ole made in his first season at the Norwegian club and ,in doing so, reveals Ole to be a deep thinker of the game and, crucially, one who has strong convictions on the way it should be played contrary to the popular image of Solskjaer as a manager with no discernible style of play and a lack of tactical nouse.
Setting aside the fact he has beaten Pep Guardiola three times in one season, outclassed one of Europe’s best sides in PSG twice and was the first manager to put some sort of dent in Klopp’s title winning Liverpool machine, for many Solskjaer is tactically naïve and is unable to drill his sides to play football in a specific way. In short, there is seemingly no “Solskjaer-ball” in the way there is “Pep-ball” or “Klopp-ball”.
Firstly, this is not as bad of a thing as it is often made out to be. Solskjaer’s willingness to be tactically flexible has been key to some of his biggest victories as manager and a crucial tool which he has employed to steer United through troubled waters, such as the clever switch to playing 3 at the back in his first full season at a time when United looked adrift.
Regardless, the idea Solskjaer has no single brand of football he wishes to play is a myth, and one which Gunning for Glory helps dismantle. At one point, OGS comments on his tactical changes at molde. He says:
“Maybe the most important thing when I got to Molde was I wanted us to play in the same way as Manchester United.”
‘Oh here we go’ I can hear you saying ‘The mythical Manchester United Way™’
But Solskjaer goes into detail by what he means by this: “I don’t want us to play with too many crosses.
“I want us to play through the opponents, in behind them more often and play in between them.”
And you can see this clearly in the way Molde played that season. While Ole is talking about the brand of football he believes in (about 2:30 in Part 2) highlights from some Molde games show them playing with skill and pace through the oppositions defence.
Their results from that season highlight the attacking nature of the brand of football Ole brought to the club too, winning several games 3–1, 5–1 and 3–2.
This was not something Ole walked into at Molde either, but his arrival at the club represented a drastic turn around in play style and one he had to coach into his players. In the doc, Ole explains how Molde played before. He says: “We had the top scorer in the Tippeligaen last year at Molde, a big tall striker, really good target man inside the box.
“So, they played with loads of long balls for him to flick on or crosses for him into the box, which I completely turned around”.
This was no necessary tactical switch, as he said they had the top scorer in the league, but one born out of a desire to play football in the way Solskjaer wanted his team to.
This took time, and Molde had a slow start to the season. They lost their opening game and drew their second and third 2–2 before finally winning 3–2 in their fourth game.
But a run of 14 wins in 18 games stretching from that first win in late April to late August (they play from March to November over there) all but secured the title for a Molde team in their 100th year who had never won the league and who had finished 11th the year previously.
“There’s no question that Manchester United have a philosophy about how they want to develop footballers and there’s no question that’s had an influence in terms of our beliefs over how we want football to be played”
One of the most interesting parts of the documentary is the occasional input from Richard Hartis. Hartis was head of Academy Goalkeeping at United from 2000–2010 and was a senior coach during the Champions League winning season of 07/08.
Hartis is a key ally and colleague to Solskjaer. He worked with him at the United academy, before Solskjaer encouraged Hartis to come with him to Molde to become part of his staff there. He followed him to Cardiff as well and in 2019 re-joined Ole as United’s senior Goalkeeping coach.
He echoes Solskjaer’s sentiments regarding the style of play he wants to see implemented at the club, speaking about the “Basic principles of getting the ball down, playing and moving and passing and running”.
But he also speaks about Solskjaer’s managerial style. In the documentary, he says “I think what might surprise people is they think of him as a nice guy, the baby-faced assassin.
“Underneath all that is a winner, who has clear ideas, a clear philosophy about how he wants his football club run and how he wants his team to play.”
“Cut us up and we’ll bleed red”
The documentary explores more than just Ole at Molde, looking at what the football club and the, then-imminent, league triumph meant for the town as well as touching on OGS’s personal life and the reasons he wanted to move back to Norway.
What also sticks out is Ole’s love of Manchester and of United. In part, yes, because it is an MUTV documentary but also because it is clear the city and club mean a lot to him and his family.
While watching his son play football in a United shirt, he comments (in his wonderfully unique Nowegian-Manc acccent) that:
“You can’t take that [United] away from us now. Cut us up and we’ll bleed red, it’s just the way it is. Even the little’un is Manchester United.
“My kids grew up there, they are proper Mancs, not the plastic Manc like I am”.
The pendulum feels as if it’s swinging back towards United and Solskjaer now. A few months ago, after the 6–2 loss to Spurs, then the exit from the Champions League and the long shadow of Pochettino hanging over him, Ole’s job seemed once again on the edge.
Yet if United beat Burnley in their next Premier League game, they go into first in the Premier League and the whispered jokes of a title charge will begin to become genuine belief and hope that something entirely unexpected could occur.
Ole has United playing football more attractive, more exciting and more effective than ever before in the post-ferguson era.
The question now of course, is how far can he take them?
Before the documentary finishes, Solskjaer talks about his future:
“My dream would be to manage Manchester United.
“I’m not saying it’s realistic, I’m not saying it’s my goal, but it’s my dream.
“It’s not realistic to follow the manager [Sir Alex Ferguson] but why not have big dreams?”
7 years later that dream would become a reality.
