FIVE ASIDES Premier League: West Ham 1, United 0
It’s been a long season, longer for United than for anyone else. Their tally of 57 games played so far is the highest for any club in Europe’s big five leagues. You can see that in the way their star players are performing, starting matches strongly and finishing them limply. You can see it in the way the boss is performing too. Erik ten Hag has had more matches to manage than the other bosses in the top five (and less Premier League experience to draw on). Again and again he has had to give a post-match interview after 10pm on a Thursday, followed by a pre-match press conference at 1pm on a Friday, often with a flight in between. He has done most things well, but as the season has dragged on more of his decisions have been tired ones.
The headlines homed in on the howler from David de Gea. Some commentators were reminded of Seville, but to me it was more like a scene from Center Parcs, when you’re watching your kid at the Football Fun Factory and they bring the mums and dads on for a jokey shoot-out at the end. Said Benrahma’s shot was a penalty from a promising six-year-old, well-aimed but moving in slow motion. De Gea was the kindly parent pretending to want to make a save, falling over rather than diving, getting a token touch. For the second game in a row, United gave their opponents a helping hand and it cost them a point. You couldn’t blame Ten Hag for that, even if it is one more reason to wonder why he is offering De Gea a new contract. But you could blame him for the fact that United were unable to turn things round as they had the last time Benrahma put them 1-0 down, two months ago in the FA Cup.
When the team sheet appeared, I thought ‘This is a draw’. It just didn’t feel like a line-up designed to get a win. With Alejandro Garnacho back there were eight forwards in the squad, and the one with the least talent was named as a starter. Wout Weghorst hadn’t been more than a sub since Newcastle away, and with good reason: his early promise had faded away as he kept slowing attacks down and failing to use his height. To make matters worse, he was picked here as a No 10, a role that turns him into a defender in disguise, as he soon showed with a fine sliding tackle in United’s box. There was a better No 10 on the bench (Marcel Sabitzer) and a far better one on the field (Bruno Fernandes, shunted out to the left when he is more threatening from the right). Yes, fresh legs were needed after Brighton, but so were fresh wits, which you get a lot more of from Sabitzer, a footballer built for the tight spaces that the forwards faced last night. On this occasion Ten Hag’s lateral thinking ended up making United play sideways. The upshot is that Casemiro, Christian Eriksen and Fernandes have lost their unbeaten record – though not when starting as the midfield trio.
The front four were half knackered and half mediocre. Fernandes and Marcus Rashford led the way as usual with shot-creating actions (eight and six respectively), but they’re like junior doctors now, too tired to be clinical. They needed more support than they were ever going to get from Weghorst and Antony. For all his flakiness, Anthony Martial is a cut above Weghorst; he keeps calm in heavy traffic and clicks with Rashford. He should have started before giving way on the hour to Garnacho, who scored against West Ham in March and might well have risen to the occasion with his sense of theatre. As it was, Garnacho never came on because Ten Hag had used up subs replacing Weghorst and Antony, and because for some unfathomable reason he preferred ten minutes of Fred. Tired minds make muddled choices.
Antony, true to form, had nothing to declare bar the odd near-miss. He and Aaron Wan-Bissaka don’t work as a pair when United have the ball because they keep playing safe little passes to each other. With Weghorst gravitating towards them, United’s right flank was an axis of mediocrity. Wan-Bissaka and Tyrell Malacia don’t work as a pair of full-backs because neither contributes much in attack. Well as Luke Shaw has done filling in at centre-back, it would have made more sense to restore him to left-back, where he can supply an assist, and bring in Harry Maguire to man-handle Michail Antonio. But in the end this game – as close as any ever is on xG, at 1.3-1.2 – was all about energy. West Ham, led by Declan Rice, had plenty of it; United didn’t have enough, so their extra class was cancelled out. The Thursday-Sunday treadmill, which had put West Ham in the relegation zone, eventually lifted them out of it. Had West Ham won that game in the Cup, United’s game at Brighton would have taken place in mid-March, and they would have been fresh last night.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. If you’re on Twitter, do follow him and United Writing. If you received this piece by email, please feel free to forward it to the nearest Red.