FIVE ASIDES Premier League: Leeds 0, United 2
‘I am not a gambler,’ Erik ten Hag said the other day. His team sheets usually bear this out: as selectors go, he’s a conservative. But yesterday he crossed the floor and joined the Monster Raving Loony Party. In the continued absence of Casemiro, the player United needed most was Lisandro Martinez, with his nose for danger and eye for a pass. As he’s banned for Barcelona this week, there was no reason to rest him, yet that is what Ten Hag did – while also (more logically) resting his partner, Rapha Varane. And after going steady all season with 4-2-3-1, he suddenly flirted with something resembling 3-2-2-3. For once, he looked like a manager who had learned at the feet of Pep Guardiola.
These ploys only half-worked. Leeds were able to set the pace (frantic) and the tone (bellicose). United were a long way from the control that Ten Hag demands. Their passing out from the back was so perilous that they could easily have been 2-0 down after 50 minutes, for the second time in five days. But the changes did smother Wilfried Gnonto, whose sparkle had cost United two points on Wednesday. Diogo Dalot hung back to keep him quiet while Tyrell Malacia played as a wing-back on the other side. This meant that most of Leeds’ chances fell to their right-winger, Crysencio Summerville, who has little of Gnonto’s composure. That part of the gamble paid off.
To win the game, though, Ten Hag had to change the plan. Today’s edition of The Times heaps praise on him for his game management when he was just correcting his own howler. He brought on Martinez, who duly instilled some calm. He took off Malacia, who had buzzed around without being incisive, and restored Luke Shaw to left-back, to add an attacking threat. He also took off Jadon Sancho, who had been understandably short of sharpness, sent Alejandro Garnacho out on the left, moved Marcus Rashford into the middle, pulled Wout Weghorst back into the hole (where he had been lurking anyway) and shunted Bruno Fernandes to the right. The upshot was that everything fell into place. It was Shaw’s curled cross that enabled Rashford to grab yet another crucial late goal, and Weghorst’s simple forward pass that set up Garnacho for the clincher. After firing blanks for 80 minutes, United had the ball in the net four times in the last 15. Rashford is now so clinical that he had only two attempts on goal in the game and beat Ilian Meslier with both.
For the third time this season, Ten Hag had found a way to exact rapid revenge on a modest opponent. He did it to Villa (1-3, then 4-2), he did it to Palace (1-1, then 2-1), and here, for the first time, he did it away from home. He is good at figuring opposing teams out, even if it sometimes takes longer than it should. And his United are full of resilience, sticking together even in the face of the fear and loathing of Elland Road. It’s a small miracle given their brittleness in the Rangnick interregnum. On xG, according to fbref.com, this game should have been 2-1 to Leeds. United did well to weather the storm and even better to win the match.
Both their loanees had a good game. Marcel Sabitzer has been through a fiery baptism, coming on late as one of the ten men holding off Palace, then facing the frenzy of Leeds twice with only Fred for company, and he has come through it looking every inch a United midfielder. If Shaw’s cross for Rashford was classy, Sabitzer’s pass to Shaw a moment earlier was even better – a switch of play straight from the school of Scholes. He is rising to the challenge of standing in for Christian Eriksen, and this is already a far happier transfer from Bayern than United’s last one, Bastian Schweinsteiger, who was frozen out by Jose Mourinho. The other loanee, Weghorst, dropped truly, madly deep – his average position was in United’s half of the centre circle, well behind Fernandes – but he did a job. He stayed on for the whole game, for only the second time in eight United appearances. He finally got his first assist after 577 minutes on the field. And he even put the ball in the net, only to be thwarted, perhaps mistakenly, by the VAR. To take a line on loan from Rob Smyth, he was playing total Woutball.
Tim de Lisle covered the match for The Guardian live blog. Rob, meanwhile, watched United’s women go top of the league.