FIVE ASIDES Premier League: United 0, Wolves 1
A dreadful performance. A well-deserved defeat. And a damning quote. ‘I didn’t think we were all there together,’ Luke Shaw said afterwards. ‘We have unbelievable quality but sometimes quality is not enough… We weren’t aggressive, we needed to bring more intensity.’ He was spot-on. Wolves played as a team, knew what they were doing, kept moving into space and looked as if they had 12 men on the field. United looked as if they had ten: they were disorganised, disjointed and dismayingly static.
The best player in the starting XI was Phil Jones, returning after two long years of injury and insults. He saved the day several times at the back, got forward like the midfielder he once was, and even finished first-equal (with Scott McTominay) for shot-creating actions. The man has a heart as big as Harry Maguire’s head. The only sub to make an impression was Bruno Fernandes, who, even if his form has been only half as good as last season, can never be accused of a lack of intensity. He should have been captaining this team, not Cristiano Ronaldo: you can’t hand the captaincy to someone, however distinguished, who has just stormed off down the tunnel in a sulk.
That was just one of a series of blunders from Ralf Rangnick. He was wrong to prefer Aaron Wan-Bissaka to Diogo Dalot at right-back; if the idea was that Wan-Bissaka would be better at stopping the quicksilver Daniel Podence, it didn’t turn out that way, and although he got into good positions to cross, Wan-Bissaka’s delivery was twice too floaty to find Ronaldo’s head. The switch to 3-3-2-2 didn’t work either, because it was a misdiagnosis. The trouble was not at the back but in midfield, where United were overrun, and at the front, where Ronaldo was being marked out of the game by Conor Coady and Edinson Cavani kept dropping deep to be the extra midfielder. It was a mystery why Rangnick didn’t send on Donny van de Beek or Jesse Lingard – and take off Ronaldo. Jamie Redknapp said United lacked belief, which was true, but Rangnick, with his selection and game management, is not giving them any more to believe in than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did in his latter days. Where’s Michael Carrick when you need him?
As well as unity and intensity, United were short of decent decision-making. Early on Jadon Sancho was sent away by a glorious long ball from Mason Greenwood. He had Ronaldo, unmarked, to his left, and all he had to do was play the simplest of passes. Instead he took a shot himself that was easily blocked. The Guardian’s account of the move called Sancho ‘Jadon Sanchez’, which seemed like fair comment. The crowd were right to boo when they saw that it was Greenwood, not Sancho, who was making way for Fernandes. Half an hour later, in the vital last few minutes before half-time, Sancho’s howler was repeated by Cavani, of all people. When Shaw found him in space outside the box with a good crisp cross, Cavani faced the same choice as Sancho: shoot from a distance or slip in Greenwood, who was unmarked in the inside-right channel. Nine times out of ten Cavani would do the right thing, but this was the tenth. He duly plonked the ball in Row Z, an expert marksman shooting like a defender.
We’ve been this way before. It was pretty much the same game United played the last time they lost 1-0 at home, in late September, as Ronaldo’s second honeymoon came to an abrupt end. Their conquerors that day were Aston Villa, who are the next team they have to face now – and the one after.