The loudest cheer was for the manager
And his team managed to win a trophy with hardly any tension. Our editor on how it felt to be there
FIVE ASIDES Carabao Cup final: United 2, Newcastle 0
You know how a team can struggle in the game after a triumph, stumbling straight through the door marked anti-climax? That didn’t happen to United at Wembley, when it easily could have. But it did happen to their supporters. (And I was among them, so I take my share of the blame.) The fans who had been so fierce in the face of Barcelona didn’t manage to do it again. We were outdone and outsung by the Newcastle fans. We were even outnumbered, all over London, by about three to one: it was as if every Geordie had brought along a doppelganger, like Ant and Dec. When we waved our red-and-white souvenir scarves, we found they were skimpy compared to the black-and-white flags billowing at the other end. But we did rally, in the 110th minute, to produce one memorable moment. As the players and the manager filed up to Level 2 to receive the cup, we had the chance to award individual ovations. The loudest cheer was the last – for Erik ten Hag. And that was spot-on.
Six and a half months earlier, only seven miles away down the North Circular, United had hit rock bottom. When they were blown away by Brentford, Ten Hag seized the moment, saw that his players had run eight and a half miles less than their opponents, made them go for a run the next day of exactly that length – and, crucially, joined them himself. He was clear, he was tough, he was brave, he was a boss. He carried the can, when a few managers we could name would have kicked it down the road.
Since then United have collected as many league points as Man City (49) from one game fewer (22). They have won six games out of eight in the Europa League, two out of two in the FA Cup, six out of six in the Carabao. So their win-draw-loss record since Brentford is 15-4-3 in the league, 14-1-1 in the cups, 29-5-4 in all. They haven’t just got better, they’ve become seriously consistent. The most striking feature of this cup win was the thing that wasn’t there: the tension. Newcastle were the better team between the two boxes, as Eddie Howe said, but they hardly ever score a goal and United hadn’t conceded one in this competition since 10 November. The crowd spent the second half waiting for a crunch that never came. Even the last few minutes were comfy-bum time.
The players did play their part too. Wout Weghorst is still a carthorse among thoroughbreds but he put in his best United performance, appearing for once as a true nine and almost scoring with a left-foot curler that we never knew he had up his sleeve. Marcus Rashford rose from the treatment table to resume his purple patch: if the deflection that brought the goal was streaky, the movement that got him there was magical. Casemiro, so used to winning finals that he prepares for them by playing cards, managed the game like a croupier. Aaron Wan-Bissaka made more tackles in one half (seven) than anyone else managed in the whole match, and even had a shot. Marcel Sabitzer, joining Casemiro on the field for the first time, brought a swift end to a spell when United had been under siege. Ten Hag could have acted earlier to bring him on and to replace Antony, the one player who slipped down a snake straight after shinning up a ladder. But the changes were good enough.
The substitutions that didn’t happen were telling. The six players who stayed on for the full 90+ minutes here were the same as on Thursday: David de Gea (who helped himself to the club’s all-time clean-sheet record), Raphael Varane, Lisandro Martinez (who were both immense as usual), Luke Shaw (who delivered another classy assist), Casemiro (who scored) and Bruno Fernandes (who should have scored, but may have been too knackered). That lot, plus Rashford and Christian Eriksen, are the core of this team, its heart and spine. They’re all leaders, all grown-ups, all plain-speakers; Rashford, when asked about Ten Hag punishing his unpunctuality, even said he would have done the same himself. And now they have some silverware to show for it.
For me, the best bit of the game came afterwards. As the players trooped up the steps through the fans and then came back down with the cup, you could feel how well they get on, how they’re all in it together. You could see that Weghorst, for all his clumsiness, brings a warmth, a gentle-giant aura, that makes a difference. Team spirit can be an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory, as Steve Archibald famously remarked. But these players have it when they’re losing too – hence the comeback against Barcelona. There will no doubt be a bad trot one day but, for the moment, this United are even greater than the sum of their parts. Given the miserable mess he inherited, Ten Hag gets even more credit for that.
Tim de Lisle writes about sport for The Guardian and music for The Mail on Sunday. If you’re still on Twitter, do follow him and United Writing.