The match that wasn't there
The game couldn't compete with the death of the Queen – but United should still have done better
FIVE ASIDES Europa League: United 0, Real Sociedad 1
This was the match that wasn’t there. The kick-off came only 90 minutes after the announcement that the Queen had died. It was the worst of timings: too late to call the game off, too soon to process what had happened – not just the loss of a monarch but the end of a long era, and a shift in the tectonic plates. No wonder the game seemed to unfold at half-speed. Sport, trivial though it is, only works when it has our full concentration.
Cristiano Ronaldo seemed more affected than most. It’s hard to tell at the moment, as he is out of form, but he seemed out of sorts too. Maybe it’s because he is older than the other players, more attuned to the passing of time. Or maybe it’s because he is sporting royalty, and he knew that even he had been eclipsed. Curiously, Ronaldo was making his Europa League debut. His last European club appearance outside the Champions League, for Sporting Lisbon, came so long ago (2002-03) that it was in the UEFA Cup. When he last played in the Champions League group stage, a year ago, he was still a cut above opposing defences, so he should be able to shine in the Europa, but it didn’t happen here. He made four of United’s 15 attempts, not one of them on target. When he did find the net, it was his own fault that the goal was disallowed as he had failed to track back from an offside position. On WhoScored he had the lowest rating of all 22 starters, and I’m afraid he deserved it.
The VAR giveth and it taketh away. Four days earlier, against Arsenal, the invisible ref saved United from going 1-0 down at home, rightly (because Martin Odegaard played the man with his hands, and the ball not at all). On Thursday the same system didn’t save them from the same fate, wrongly, because Lisandro Martinez made a block and couldn’t do a thing about the ball bouncing up off his leg onto his elbow. He deserved a round of applause, not a yellow card. It’s in the rules, expressed inelegantly but with perfect clarity: ‘There shall be no penalty if the ball touches a player’s hand/arm immediately from their own head/body/foot.’ That said, the luck had been with United on Sunday and they couldn’t entirely complain that it deserted them now. And they had time to rescue the situation, with half an hour still on the clock. Erik ten Hag’s new-look United, who show plenty of fight when defending a lead, are no good at overturning one: in seven games, they have yet to score a single equaliser.
Ten Hag stumbled with his selection, perhaps thrown by Ronaldo’s presence. He brought Fred back, not in the engine room where he belongs but as a No 10, presumably so he could do Ronaldo’s pressing for him. What the front four gained in energy, they lost in creativity. Anthony Elanga, with his tireless running, may have been there for the same reason, but again there was a price to pay as his final ball was often feeble. Ten Hag also reinstated Harry Maguire, who acquitted himself well but has now become a talisman in reverse, having started in all three of United’s defeats this season and none of their four wins. It was great to get a glimpse of Charlie McNeill, whose promotion from the Under-21s is overdue, but frustrating to find that Ten Hag’s belief in teenagers, like Ralf Rangnick’s, only extends to giving them a little cameo. (McNeill got eight minutes and two touches.) And that may not change now that United have blown the chance to coast through their group. Thursday nights are going to be harder work than we thought.
They are scoring too few goals against middling teams. So far it’s been just three in five games (1-2, 0-4, 1-0, 1-0, 0-1). That’s 0.6 goals per game, as compared to 2.5 against fellow members of the big six. How can you be four times more incisive in the face of stronger opposition? Because you use the ball better when you have less of it; because you have players who rise to the occasion; because both those big games were at home, and the crowd played its part. But most games are not big games and United have to get better at dispatching the smaller fry. Palace away would have been a good place to start, had the FA not panicked and postponed this weekend’s games.
Tim de Lisle writes about sport for The Guardian and music for The Mail on Sunday. If you’re on Twitter, do follow him and United Writing.