Played five, scored five, conceded five
After the bonanza against Barnsley, United went back to missing chances. And Erik ten Hag was partly to blame
FIVE ASIDES Premier League: Palace 0, United 0
Erling Haaland has ten league goals this season. Luis Diaz has five – and so do Manchester United. While three United players scored twice against Barnsley in the Carabao Cup, not one of them has managed two in the first five weekends of the Premier League put together. In their five games, United have scored five and conceded five. It’s all very neat and tidy - and quite worrying. Two years ago Erik ten Hag inherited a team that had scored just 57 goals in a whole league season. And how have they done under him? Just the same: 58 in his first season, 57 in his second. This season, when we thought things could only get better, they’ve actually got worse. United have played more fluently, except in the middle half-hour against Liverpool, but they have remained tongue-tied in the box. According to xG, they should have scored ten league goals by now, conceded eight, and collected nine points. The extra two points should have come on Saturday, when they were all over Palace in the first half. It was 1-2 overall on xG and the only surprise there was that United’s figure wasn’t higher. The star performer, rightly picked as the player of the match by Alan Smith, was the one who got away – Dean Henderson. André Onana was good too, and so was Diogo Dalot, holding the fort in midfield, allowing Kobbie Mainoo and Christian Eriksen to go on the attack.
In the Premier League table of big chances missed this season, United have three players in the top ten. Alejandro Garnacho and Joshua Zirkzee are among those sharing the bronze booby prize with four big misses each, and Bruno Fernandes is just behind them on three. (Fernandes has had the most shots by anybody in the PL without a goal – 17. His shooting has become as scattergun as his passing.) If you run your eye down the list of Premier League players with most shots on target in 2024-25, the first United name you come across is … Matthijs de Ligt, with five in 266 minutes. Zirkzee has been on target five times too, from 310 minutes. United’s Dutchmen aren’t exactly flying, but at least they’re testing the keeper.
United do have two players who have outperformed their expected goals in the league this season. Can you name them? One is fairly predictable – it’s Amad, United’s brightest spark in attack at the beginning of the season. He has one goal from an xG of 0.51, according to WhoScored. The other may be harder to guess: it’s Marcus Rashford, who has done fractionally better with one goal from an xG of 0.49. You wait ages for a goal from Rashford, then three come at once – two against Barnsley to go with that one at Southampton. As United headed for Selhurst Park, Rashford had three goals in his last 94 minutes on the pitch. So what did Ten Hag do? He stuck him on the bench! Maybe this is why the manager has been mainly reluctant to rotate: he’s not very good at it. Any of the fans, picking the team on Saturday, would have kept Rashford in the starting XI – even, surely, those who booed when he wasn’t taken off against Liverpool. Ten Hag could hardly complain at coming under fire from Jamie Redknapp (though he tried), because his decision flew in the face of common sense and emotional intelligence. Strike while the striker is hot.
It was true that Alejandro Garnacho had been under-used, but there were ways of getting them both into the XI. Ten Hag managed it for most of last season, after all. He could have kept Rashford in the middle and Garnacho on the left, with Amad recalled on the right. Or he could have left Amad on the bench with Zirkzee returning as the semi-false nine, to play through balls to Rashford on the left and Garnacho on the right. When Rashford did come on, he had 15 minutes in Zirkzee’s place up front and then 18 on the left when Rasmus Højlund made his first appearance of the season. In those 33 minutes, Rashford didn’t have a single shot (just as he didn’t against Fulham, Brighton or Liverpool, though he had the ball in the net against Brighton and his expected assists were high in the other two games). One problem was that the player most likely to find him on the left, Eriksen, went off just as Rashford moved there. He was replaced by Manuel Ugarte, a move that made the 0-0 more likely, tightening United’s defences while watering down their creativity. Another problem was that Højlund was understandably rusty: only two of his four passes found a team-mate (though that was better than Kai Havertz for Arsenal against City: six passes attempted in 90 minutes, not one completed). It would surely have been wiser to hold Højlund back for the Europa game against FC Twente, in view of his fine form in the Champions League last autumn, and to send on Casemiro, who has a goal in him, ahead of Ugarte. Ten Hag’s substitutions felt mechanical, premeditated rather than pragmatic, whereas Oliver Glasner had used his to turn the tide.
Still, United didn’t lose, which was a step forward after their trip to Palace. And they are creating plenty of chances – but they badly need to win matches like this. On Match Of The Day, Jonathan Pearce produced a melancholy stat: United had suffered 24 league defeats in London in 64 games since Sir Alex Ferguson retired – the same number as in 118 visits when he was in charge. So they’re about twice as vulnerable in London as they were then. London is the one city where you can’t afford to flop, simply because it has so many clubs – four above United in the current table, three below. Last season, in those seven away games, United managed one win (at Fulham and one draw (at Brentford) and suffered five defeats, with the two decent results both secured in added time. So although a second successive PL clean sheet (for the first time since three in a row last November) was welcome, the blank United drew at the other end was part of a pattern. Their next date in London, at West Ham on 27 October, comes only 66 hours after a bruising trip to Fenerbahce, where Jose Mourinho will be waiting for them. Ten Hag is going to have to get better at rotation.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian, where he live-blogged this match.