FIVE ASIDES Premier League: United 2, Brentford 1
Where were you when Scott McTominay had his finest five minutes? I was in the Bobby Charlton stand, grateful to have borrowed a season ticket (thanks John) but, at 90 minutes, rather wondering why I’d bothered to drive for six hours to get there. Fergie time? It didn’t feel like that at all. The 73,000 people inside Old Trafford were trapped in a different zone: Brentford mean time. The visiting goalie, Thomas Strakosha, had been time-wasting for a full hour without even going into the book. The home fans had booed United off at half-time and it felt as if only Strakosha’s shameless refusal to play football was stopping them booing in mid-game. The away fans were serenading Erik ten Hag with ‘You’re getting sacked in the morning.’ Everything, in short, was going to shit.
But Strakosha was about to discover one of the eternal verities of sport: instant karma’s gonna get you. If he hadn’t wasted all that time, McTominay – sent on in the 87th minute as United’s fifth sub, and Ten Hag’s last throw of the dice – would only have been able to salvage a point. Instead six minutes were added on and the equaliser (plus yet more time-wasting) stretched it to seven, which was just enough. McTominay, usually such an undramatic character, had turned into Sheringham and Solskjaer rolled into one. It may seem as if this kind of thing used to happen all the time, but United had never before won a league match they had been losing at 90 minutes. They managed it because they went long, pumping high balls into the box and adopting a formation that looked more like an anagram. I made it 2-1-3-4, with Christian Eriksen at left-back, Bruno Fernandes as the pivot, and four centre-forwards all standing in a row, like the stewards. McTominay was there as a target man, the new Marouane Fellaini.
This was the first game since the death of Lady Ferguson. As Cathy Holding, she had fallen for Alex Ferguson in 1964, so long ago that they were both working in a factory that made typewriters (he was playing football too, for St Johnstone, but only part-time). The United team wore black armbands in her honour, and Ten Hag had one on the sleeve of his Paul Smith cardigan. Ten years after Ferguson finally left the technical area, the thread that leads back to his era can feel very thin, but in this XI was a man who had played for him 150 times: Jonny Evans, making his first league start at Old Trafford (in a red shirt) since 2015. When Brentford took the lead through André Onana’s latest clanger, you rather wished that another Ferguson signing, David de Gea, had been there too.
From the back pages to Harry Maguire’s Twitter feed, this comeback was naturally hailed as a case of Fergie time. And it was, but more than that, it was forged in Fergie’s time. McTominay started training with United at the age of five in 2002, when the golden years still had another decade left to run. He had spent the night before this game mugging up on that very chapter of the club’s history. ‘It was funny,’ he said, ‘because I was watching the David Beckham documentary last night, and you see all the history and the people behind the club. That’s who the lads do it for and that’s who it means most to – Kath [Phipps] on reception, the kitmen … It’s so important that we all come together and that’s what it means at this football club. We do it for the people that have been coming for many, many years.’ When United posted the interview on Instagram, more than 400,000 people responded and one of them was Beckham. ‘It’s what it’s always been about,’ he wrote. ‘Well said.’ He slipped a heart in there too – you wouldn’t get that from Roy Keane.
United had been feeble for the first 92 minutes. They played as if they were flummoxed to find Brentford parking the bus. Rasmus Hojlund was moving like a 4x4 when we needed a Deliveroo bike. Marcus Rashford managed a few dribbles, and United’s only shot on target in the first half, while still clearly missing Luke Shaw: in Victor Lindelof, Rashford had his fifth different sidekick in seven league games (after Shaw, Diogo Dalot, Sergio Reguilon and Sofyan Amrabat). Mason Mount, signed to add ingenuity like Juan Mata, was looking as lost as Donny van de Beek. The only forward to play well was Alejandro Garnacho, twisting his way to a late twist, carving out the cut-back that led to McTominay’s masterly first goal. Casemiro continued to suffer from the collywobbles, giving the ball away cheaply for the Brentford goal, starting an outbreak of blunders that also infected Lindelof and Onana. Evans was secure, Amrabat (picked in midfield at last) was tidy and Fernandes was tireless enough to have a hand in both goals, but United’s best starter was Maguire, of all people. It was he who produced the only assist of the match with a header to McTominay that was just square enough to deter Strakosha from coming out to grab it. Two players Ten Hag wanted to sell in the summer had come together to save his job. By the next day, thanks to Arsenal, there was a title race. Suddenly the Manchester club on a losing streak in the domestic game is not United.
Tim de Lisle, a United fan since the days of Wilf McGuinness, is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter at The Guardian. If you’re on Twitter, do follow Tim and United Writing.