FIVE ASIDES Premier League: United 1, Fulham 2
This was so bad, it was like last autumn. United started both halves looking tired and uninspired. Their midfield was soon overrun: Kobbie Mainoo, so commanding in tough away games, struggles to stop the rot at home. Bruno Fernandes is out of form, though he still makes things happen (like United’s goal). Casemiro keeps getting brushed aside and has yet to accept that as we get older, we have to play safer. Marco Silva, who could have placed his chips on United’s lack of a left-back, instead decided to pack his midfield, playing Andreas Pereira deeper than usual and telling Alex Iwobi to come in off the left wing. Iwobi scored the winner and should have had two; Pereira was only denied by a fine save from André Onana. United, as Morgan Gibbs-White showed on their last trip to Nottingham, are fun to play against if you’re an attacking midfielder.
Rasmus Højlund, who couldn’t score a league goal to save his life before Christmas, suddenly seems indispensable. His injury meant that there had to be one change to a front line that had finally clicked, but Erik ten Hag elected to make two more. He shifted Marcus Rashford from the left to the middle, moved Alejandro Garnacho from the right to the left, and brought in Omari Forson on the right. It was like a Cabinet reshuffle that hadn’t been thought through. Promising though he is, Forson soon looked like what he had previously been, the fifth- or sixth-best option on the right wing – behind Garnacho, Amad, Bruno Fernandes, Facundo Pellistri (now out on loan) and even Antony. By moving Garnacho across to the left, Ten Hag messed not just with Rashford’s improving confidence but with the blossoming rapport between Garnacho and Diogo Dalot. It would surely have done less damage to leave Rashford and Garnacho where they were and pick the most Haaland-like player to slot between them: Scott McTominay. He’s tall, he’s tireless, he’s tenacious, he scores goals, and if he had dropped deep out of habit, it would have helped the midfield. Instead Ten Hag kept him on the bench for 53 minutes, and even after that, persisted with Rashford as a round peg in a square hole. The manager’s decisions are beginning to contradict each other: Christian Eriksen, who replaced Mainoo soon after half-time, was all over the place at first, and you couldn’t blame him when he hadn’t played a single minute in six weeks.
‘I'm not going to change after one defeat,’ Ten Hag said afterwards. ‘You have to see the bigger picture. The bigger picture looks very good.’ Since Jim Ratcliffe became his boss, Ten Hag has begun to sound as if he's reapplying for his own job, because, in effect, he is. The home truths he used to utter have been replaced by the sort of windy blather people come out with in job interviews. He hasn’t been fired, but he has been somewhat undermined. It’s an unenviable position to be in, as I know from experience (at a magazine, not a football club). Bosses need to be confident and outgoing – putting arms round shoulders, not looking over them. Ratcliffe, so forthcoming about his wish to knock City and Liverpool off their perch’ has been noticeably non-committal about Ten Hag. He should back him or sack him, but seems unlikely to do either while United still have a faint chance of reaching the Champions League.
Ten Hag didn’t help his cause by talking about ‘one defeat’. United have now had ten in the league alone. And three of them have been at home to Palace, Bournemouth and Fulham - the sort of thing you can only get away with once a season. Each of those embarrassments came at 3pm on a Saturday, a slot you might think a big football team could cope with. They’ve played two other home games at that time of the week, losing 3-1 to Brighton and only scraping past Brentford with two goals from Scott McTominay in Fergie Time. Here, they threatened a repeat when Harry Maguire equalised in the 89th minute, but Fergie Time favours the brave. And that, in this case, meant Fulham.
Maguire displayed all his strengths and weaknesses at the same time. He got booked early on for a reckless tackle on Sasa Lukic that could have brought a straight red (even if it would have been harsh). He played some of United’s better long passes, but also wasted time dawdling on the ball: he had 96 touches, more than any team-mate, which was probably fine by Fulham. He missed United’s best chance, when a Fernandes corner homed in on his famous forehead, but then atoned for that with a goal he himself did much to create. After scrapping away in the inside-right channel, he fired in a cross from the byline that ended up with Fernandes, whose shot brought a parry from Bernd Leno, which enabled Maguire to pounce from close range. Finally, he allowed the impressive Rodrigo Muniz to lay the ball off to Adama Traore, and then opted not to bring Traore down because it would have meant being sent off and missing the Manchester derby. So, indirectly, that misjudged tackle ended up costing United a point. And H, as the players call him, was both the hero and the villain.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. He watched this game from the furthest reaches of the Ferguson Stand.