An embarrassment, not a disaster
Bereft of belief, United regressed to Rangnick levels. But they can recover from this
FIVE ASIDES Premier League: City 6, United 3
They’re still so brittle. If United were an item you were packing up as you moved house, they’d be marked HANDLE WITH CARE. Just when we thought they’d toughened up under Erik Ten Hag, they produced a performance so poor that it could have been masterminded by Ralf Rangnick. Their passing early on, when they did get the ball, was hopeless. As Gary Neville said, they were rattled. As our own Rob Smyth put it, they were frazzled. As Ten Hag said afterwards, they showed no belief. When they should have been raring to cash in on the absence of Rodri and City’s regular centre-backs, United were timid from the very beginning – apart from Diogo Dalot who went the other way and was rash. He was suckered into a yellow card by the Premier League’s master foulee, Jack Grealish, not in the 20th minute, or the tenth, but the second. Dalot did quite well to stay on for the full 90.
Ten Hag didn’t act fast enough. After half an hour, United had been over-run, but they were still only 1-0 down and had somehow kept Erling Haaland off the scoresheet. That was the moment to send on Casemiro, who blunted City when he was at Real Madrid. At Brentford, when United were 4-0 down, Ten Hag sent on three subs at half-time – Tyrell Malacia for Luke Shaw, Rafa Varane for Lisandro Martinez and Scott McTominay for Fred. Here, faced with the same mountain to climb, he sent on only one half-time sub – Shaw for Malacia, in a neat piece of symmetry. Shaw, buoyed by a goal and a good performance for England against Germany, played pretty well. So did Casemiro.
Ten Hag could point to the fact that he had already used one sub (Lindelof for the injured Varane). But he still had four up his sleeve and could surely have sent on Casemiro too, for McTominay – or for Jadon Sancho or Marcus Rashford. Those two, so good recently, were barely there. Rashford, returning from injury, had the tentative air that clung to him for half of last season, with barely a glimmer of the verve that had made him the Premier League’s Player of the Month for September. Anthony Martial, also back from injury, was sharper. We love Rashford, but he led the press so half-heartedly that it might as well have been Cristiano Ronaldo out there. [Update: in an analysis for The Athletic, Michael Cox shows that Rashford did do his share of the press – the reason Nathan Ake kept floating past him into the centre circle was because the press, as so often with United, was not a concerted effort. Others, from Paul Scholes to Arsene Wenger, have pointed out that Sancho and Antony didn’t do enough to help out their full-backs. So Rashford is off the hook.]
The fighting spirit that came flooding back against Liverpool was flushed down the toilet here. According to SofaScore, United lost the individual battles – the duels by 41-26, the aerials 9-5. City had nine successful dribbles out of ten, United four out of 11. City put in seven successful crosses out of ten, United none out of four. United had as many shots from distance as City (6-5), but far fewer shots from inside the box (5-17). United’s best hope was the counter-attack, yet they didn’t mount one in the whole game. City managed two and scored from one of them. Haaland and Kevin de Bruyne were unplayable, but Phil Foden had just been made to look ordinary in the Nations League – England’s fightback against Germany, a fusillade of three goals in 13 minutes, came just after he’d been taken off. But against United, he, like Haaland, shone so brightly that he was given 10/10 on WhoScored. City’s worst performer, Nathan Ake with 6.2, earned a higher rating than any United starter bar Antony (7.2).
The result was an embarrassment, but not a disaster. Martial’s late brace softened the blow (his penalty was so good, it could have been taken by Ivan Toney). We already know that Ten Hag’s United can have a shocker in one game and bounce back in the next. And in the Big Six table for 2022/23 they are still top, with six points, to City’s and Arsenal’s three. Yes, it’s partly because they’ve played more – three big games already. But that’s three out of only five that have taken place in this strange stuttering season, so politely interrupted by the death of the Queen. In other words, three of United’s seven league games so far have been super-tough ones. They’ve beaten Liverpool and Arsenal, and collected at least three more points from the three games than we had any right to expect. As yet, 43pc of their league fixtures have been against the Big Six; from now on, only 23pc will be. They can still have a good season – as long as they sweep aside the small fry.
Tim de Lisle writes about sport for The Guardian and music for The Mail on Sunday. If you’re on Twitter, do follow him and United Writing.