FIVE ASIDES Europa League: Omonia Nicosia 2, United 3
An equaliser! A comeback! After months of all-or-nothing, United finally found their traditional ability to flirt with disaster before running into the arms of relief. As turnarounds go, Cyprus 2022 wasn't exactly Camp Nou 1999, but it was still good to see. United recovered from a dreadful blunder by showing persistence, steel and class. Erik ten Hag recovered from a half-arsed selection with some ruthless substitutions. No sports team can afford to lose their resilience, and United have now located theirs.
Back in May, you would not have bet on the agents of that resilience being Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial. One was a shadow of himself and the other, stranded in a failed loan at Sevilla, wasn’t even that. These two sometimes seem too alike to be in the same team - both fast, mercurial and lethal in the inside-left channel. But then people thought that about Bruno Fernandes and Christian Eriksen, and like them Rashford and Martial have an easy rapport. Rashford’s shot for the equaliser, from a Scholes-style long ball by Fernandes, was a beauty, instantly reproduced by Martial’s shot for 2-1. This in turn was teed up by a no-look flick from Rashford, who then added the third. Rashford already has five goals and two assists this season, as many in eight matches as he managed in 32 last season. Not content with feeding hungry kids, he has quadrupled his own productivity. If I remember right, all those goals have come when he's been on the left wing. Now that both of them are fit, Rashford has to start on the left and Martial in the middle, leaving Jadon Sancho to compete with Antony on the right.
There is another striker in the picture, a guy you may have heard of. Cristiano Ronaldo, starting ahead of Martial, produced everything but the goal he craves. At 37 he has become mortal - snatching at a shot, ballooning a free kick, finding the post when faced with an open goal, and showing his frustration too readily. But the rest of his game was the best it had been since he returned from taking time to grieve for his son. He was moving faster, looking sharper, making more runs. Ronaldo fully earned his assist for Rashford’s second goal, even if his cross was a misdirected shot, and he had helped with the first by making a decoy run. In this mood, he might even have troubled Messrs Ake and Akanji.
United could have done with a clean sheet after conceding six of the worst at the Etihad. But they blew it by repeating a mistake from the Solskjaer era: allowing modest continental opponents to score from a corner - a United corner, that is. Sancho played an awful back pass to Tyrell Malacia, leaving him in a one-on-one that he might have coped with if he hadn't fallen over, and only Eriksen spotted the danger. Both Sancho and Malacia had been poor against City and both stayed in the starting XI when many fans might have dropped them, but at least ten Hag rectified his mistake by hauling them off at half-time. Sancho is a curious player - clinical in the box, often clueless on the flank. Malacia is a fighter with a taste for adventure, but naive and always a yellow card waiting to happen. Luke Shaw really should be able to nail down his place.
I'm writing this at Heathrow, where the queues are long and the shops are shameless. At WH Smith a bar of chocolate catches the eye. It's Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, it’s big, and it's United-branded, with a montage of images and slogans. Cadbury's have done all right with the players' shirts they include - Rashford 10, Fernandes 18, Ronaldo 7. Safe till January, even if Fernandes now wears 8. Neighbouring bars for other big-six clubs do worse, mentioning Lacazette 9 and Mane 10. But hang on, what's this emblazoned on the side of the United bar? 'OLE'S AT THE WHEEL.’ Something tells me to save my £6.99.