Diary of a madman: why Ole Gunnar Solskjaer took on football's toughest job

OLE Gunnar Solskjaer has long been a prolific diarist.

Former Norwegian international and Manchester United striker Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has taken on the job of manager at Cardiff ...

OLE Gunnar Solskjaer has long been a prolific diarist. He picked up the habit while still a player at Manchester United, assiduously noting down every training session, every game, every day of his career.

He would carefully describe details of Alex Ferguson's coaching methods, his tactical meetings and his management style. He kept a log of his mental state, too, mentioning how he felt when he was on the receiving end of Roy Keane's razor-sharp tongue.

Solskjaer always knew that he wanted to be a manager. His journals were there to ensure that he had a rich pool of information and inspiration.

He kept on observing, noting, writing while still a young coach, first at United, then at Molde. They must number many hundreds of pages now and would make for fascinating reading. By his own admission, Solskjaer was a "boring man, but a reflective one".

In those moments in the past few days when he has not been negotiating with Vincent Tan, his new overlord at Cardiff City, and Mehmet Dalman, his new chairman, Solskjaer has been consulting his notes. Such is Tan's reputation, it would be sensible to make sure they do not become a mere reference work.

He would do well to keep them updated over the coming months and, theoretically, years. By the time he leaves, he could have a bestseller on his hands.

To many critics, Tan exhibits some of the very worst characteristics of the new breed of Premier League owners. He has changed the colour of Cardiff's shirt and the style of their badge, appearing to show scant regard for traditions. He stands accused of a variety of footballing offences, some proven, others ranging from the possibly apocryphal to the bizarre.

They range from conspiring to make the position of Malky Mackay, Solskjaer's predecessor, untenable and replacing the club's head of recruitment with a work experience kid (guilty) to telling Mackay he wanted the team to play the high-octane football seen in the victory over Manchester City every week (possibly apocryphal) and suggesting that players should shoot more frequently from inside their own half (bizarre).

That is what makes Solskjaer's appointment all the more baffling. Why would a promising young manager, his reputation burnished by three impressive debut years in Norway, having turned down Aston Villa, among others, for not being quite right, decide to get into bed with Tan?

Gary Neville, Solskjaer's former teammate, describes the Norwegian, as "intelligent, with a studious football brain". From the outside, for all his assertions that the reality of Tan is nothing like the public caricature, this decision runs contrary to that.

It is clear what has tempted Solskjaer away from the blissful tranquillity of Molde and into the super-heated frenzy of the Premier League. "Molde are not too small, but I needed that next step in my football career," he said yesterday (Thursday). "The three years I was at Molde, we have been in Europe, we won the league a couple of times, won the cup, played against top teams. "What it taught me most was that when you are out of Europe, and you play a cup final like we did six weeks ago (against Rosenborg in Oslo), I need a full stadium, I need passion. I need the Premier League back again. That is where I had my best times as a player and it is the best place to be involved in football. It was a difficult decision to come to Cardiff because of my family - they are settled really well in Kristiansund - but the football decision was made early, because of the potential of the club, the passion of the fans. This is a big club.

"That is one of the factors that intrigued me about Cardiff: the passion of the fans. They love their club, they support their heroes every week. To come out there and scream their hearts out: if you are to manage a club, you want that passion."

In a sense, though, passion has been Cardiff's problem in recent weeks. There has been rather too much of it, and it has not been directed in especially sensible ways. Tan may not seem to love the club at times, but it is impossible to accuse him of lacking the desire to succeed. What this club need is someone to control all that energy, to curb the excesses and prevent them growing disruptive.

That task appears to fall to Dalman. Though the majority of questions at Cardiff's press conference yesterday (Thursday) were directed at Solskjaer - and though a flotilla of Norwegian journalists had arrived, possibly by longboat, to see him - the significance of the man seated to his left should not be underestimated.

Dalman seems to have brought a semblance of order to Cardiff's executive tier, to ensure that there is no repeat of the chaos that enveloped Mackay's reign. It was Dalman who was commissioned by Tan to find a new manager, and Dalman who identified Solskjaer as what he describes as "the only candidate".

"I only had one person in mind from the very beginning," the chairman said. "I wanted to act with speed to make sure we got the right man. If I told you the candidates who had rung up, you would be surprised by the names that wanted to come here. It was good to see, but I said we had one target, and we were sticking with him. I am delighted."

If Dalman's criteria for choosing Solskjaer - "I have watched him play so many times in the last decade" - do not seem entirely relevant, the way he seems determined to frame their relationship is much more encouraging.

Both men spoke repeatedly of their "open, pragmatic, commonsense dialogue", highlighting the mutual "faith in each other's words". Solskjaer made it plain that Dalman had persuaded him to take the leap.

What Cardiff need, if the unpleasantness of the past six weeks is to be consigned to memory, is communication. There was not enough of it with Mackay.

If Solskjaer and Dalman can keep talking, the new manager's high-stakes gamble may yet pay off. His diaries would not prove quite such a page-turner, but it would provide a more uplifting chapter in his career.