A buccaneering start to the season
United's selection may have been conservative, but their performance blew Leeds away
FIVE ASIDES Premier League: United 5, Leeds 1
It seemed so last season. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer picked a team that was both unexpected and highly conservative – no van de Beek, no Sancho, no 4-3-3, and the dread McFred stuck in the middle. But within five minutes we could see that this was a case of plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Same team, different approach: far more buccaneering. Spurred on by the return of the crowd, United began the 2020/21 season in style. For a moment, at 1-1. they flirted with a first-weekend flop to match last year’s anticlimax against Palace. But then Mason Greenwood scored a beautiful goal and Old Trafford was rocking again. Even McFred were moving the ball rapidly into the many spaces Leeds left behind them; soon even Fred had scored, and United had knocked the mighty Brentford off the top of the table. Last weekend, against Everton, United rattled up the kind of score you only expect to see in pre-season; this weekend, they did it again, for real, against opponents who had looked highly testing on paper. All the Leeds giants who have left us lately, from Jack Charlton to Terry Cooper, must have been turning in their graves. This is the weekend when, thanks to the crowds, home wins have become the norm again; but, as the Sports Report theme tune rang out on Saturday afternoon, nobody had a bigger home win than United.
On Friday Solskjaer said he didn’t want the leading scorer to be a midfielder again. This was meant to be a gauntlet thrown down to the likes of Anthony Martial. Instead it just spurred on Bruno Fernandes to score even more goals than usual. The man who became a crowd favourite in the absence of crowds heard his name being sung by 70,000 people, and you could see on his face that it was music to his ears. He bagged United’s first goal of the season, and the third, and the fourth, to chalk up his first United hat-trick. In between these joyful finishes, his passing was, as usual, fearlessly ambitious. You just wish at times that he could pass to himself.
The jury is still out on Mason Greenwood at centre forward. But maybe today was the day when the jurors began to make up their minds. Sitting in for Edinson Cavani, Greenwood played more like Harry Kane – dropping deep, winning the ball, shielding it shrewdly, distributing it smartly. The only problem with the crisp angled pass he played to Paul Pogba early on was that it wasn’t the other way round: in the time Pogba took to do a step-over, Greenwood would surely have drilled the ball past Illan Meslier. But he duly got his goal, storming in from the left as he has so often done from the right, and although Fernandes and Pogba were the joint leading men, Greenwood put in his bid for best player in a supporting role.
Pogba, after that early miss, was magnificent. The timing was very Pogbaesque: just when his commitment to United is in doubt, he goes and displays all his vision, his touch, his strength, his creativity, his ability to lift the players around him. Four assists in the space of 40 minutes – it may have been the best performance ever that didn’t win Man of the Match.
Henderson; Dalot, Varane, Bailly, Telles; Matic, van de Beek; Sancho, Lingard, Rashford; Cavani. That is United’s 2nd XI, right now – not by choice, of course, but it’s about the best team you can put together from those who didn’t start today. (Looking at that list, you wonder how Dan James, whole-hearted though he is, gets anywhere near the first team. Just sell him!) Beyond them, in the 3rds, lie the underrated Axel Tuanzebe, the pugnacious Brandon Williams, the elegant James Garner, the exciting Amad, the masterly Juan Mata and the electric Anthony Elanga, not to mention Ethan Laird, Teden Mengi, Will Fish, Ethan Galbraith, Shola Shoretire, Hannibal Mejbri, Tahiti Chong, Joe Hugill and Charlie McNeill. And some pundits will still tell you that United lack strength in depth. If anything, they’ve got too much of it – too many talented players to keep happy. It’s not a bad problem to have.