It’s Sesko time!
When a striker is on fire, why keep him on ice?
EIGHT ASIDES
Premier League
West Ham 1, United 1
Benjamin Sesko doesn’t start, but he sure does finish. At the London Stadium, he had two shots on target in 28 minutes (including stoppage time). The other 27 outfield players had four shots on target between them in 1912 minutes. In five games under Michael Carrick, Sesko has been on the field for 97 minutes (real ones, not the official numbers that stop the clock at 90), so basically one full match. He has scored twice and had six shots, four of them on target. Both those goals have come at the last gasp – in the 94th minute against Fulham and the 96th against West Ham. In two fell swoops, he won three points. Fergie time is turning into Sesko time.
The numbers tell a story: Sesko is on red-hot form. He’s in that rarefied zone where Rasmus Højlund was this time two years ago (when United won four league games in a row, with Højlund scoring in all four) and Marcus Rashford was the year before (when they won five in a row and Rashford scored in the last four of those, on his way to 11 goals in 12 games). We would have been amazed if either Højlund or Rashford had been on the bench then, game after game.
There are reasons why Carrick might have wanted to keep Sesko as a super-sub. It had been working, and so had the starting line-up. Plus, if all of United’s more flexible forwards are in the XI, the opposing manager doesn’t know whether his centre-backs will be faced with Bryan Mbeumo, or Matheus Cunha, or Bruno Fernandes (who was United’s most advanced player against West Ham until Sesko came on). When Sesko starts, everyone knows that United will be pumping in crosses. But it was clear at half-time that Carrick’s plan A was finally faltering. Nuno Espirito Santo knows exactly how to play the underdog: in ten previous games against United with Wolves, Forest and West Ham, he had lost only twice. He made the first half of this game a stalemate (0.05-0.21 on xG), then stole a goal on the counter – doing to United what they had done to City. Carrick probably should have sent Sesko on at half-time, and definitely should have sent him on when United went behind. And it shouldn’t have been Cunha going off, as eventually happened after 69 minutes, because he’s shown that he can pull a rabbit out of his hat at any time.
It should have been Amad. He’s a lovely player, and Carrick clearly loves him too (he has kept him on the field at all times bar the dying minutes at Arsenal, when Noussair Mazraoui came on to protect the 3-2 lead). But Amad’s goal involvements have gone missing. He has only four for United all season, the same as he managed in five games for Côte d’Ivoire at the African Cup of Nations. United’s three best chances against West Ham all came from crosses from the right, yet none of them were sent in by Amad, even though he was out there for much of the game. The first was from Kobbie Mainoo to Casemiro, producing the disallowed goal (United’s sixth in Carrick’s five games); the second from Fernandes to Joshua Zirkzee, yielding the header that went just wide; and the third from Mbeumo to Sesko, bringing the last-gasp sigh of relief.
Amad has gone off the boil, perhaps partly because he worked so hard at Afcon. It’s not a big problem because Carrick’s formation doesn’t need him as badly as Ruben Amorim’s did. If he was on the bench, you’d have Mbeumo on the right, Sesko leading the line, Cunha on the left, Fernandes in the hole. That’s a front four to match Carrick’s reshaped back four, with everyone in their natural position, except perhaps Cunha – though he has licence to drift and has used it well, scoring from inside-right against Fulham. Just as Carrick could hardly have done more to state his case as the next manager, so Sesko could hardly have done more to deserve a place in the first XI. The last time he started, at Turf Moor under Darren Fletcher, he scored twice. The goal he got here was fabulous, a strike of genius. He’s been talking to Dimitar Berbatov and here, for the first time, Sesko’s touch was a thing of Berba-like beauty.
As disappointments go, this was a mild one. It’s deceptively hard to win two PL games in four days (over the past week, only City managed it). Carrick made it harder by refusing to rotate: when there’s no recovery time, sticking with the same XI is twisting. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off – as Carrick said afterwards, ‘We didn’t have that sharpness, that spark.’ But he’s still very much in credit, still unbeaten in both his stints as the boss. This was actually United’s best result at the London Stadium for three years. The slight worry is that it continues a pattern from Amorim’s time, whereby United struggle against the strugglers. This season, against the current bottom six, United have three wins in ten games (with the other seven all drawn). Against the current top six, they have four wins in seven games (with the other three all lost). They’ve been most effective against the middle eight clubs (five wins in nine games, with two draws and two defeats). The good news is that they have seven games left of that kind, whereas there are only two to come against the bottom six.
After facing two of his old teams, Carrick is about to come up against one of his old bosses, David Moyes, who is like Nuno but more so. Carrick should be using this 11-day break to work out how to find ways around the bus that Moyes well park. Instead, Carrick finds himself putting out the fires started by Jim Ratcliffe’s blazing hypocrisy. An immigrant himself (in Monaco), who has put an immigrant in charge of United, whose team relies heavily on immigants and the children of immigrants, complaining about immigration: you couldn’t make it up. Ratcliffe had already lost the Stretford End and the back office; now he has surely lost the dressing-room too, and the executive suite, and the stewards, and all the fans around the world who believe in live-and-let-live.
United are still unbeaten in the league since Christmas, unlike any other PL club. (Arsenal and City have lost once each – to United.) They’re still top of the form table, by a whisker from a resurgent Bournemouth. They’re still fourth, as Chelsea obligingly stumbled too. They’re still three points clear of Liverpool and five clear of Brentford. They have to play all three of those clubs in a series of six-pointers, one after the other, from 18 April to 3 May. Let’s hope Sesko is still on fire then.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. He’s been supporting United since the days when they went to West Ham and got stuck in the mud.