BRUNO’S FOURTH ROUND KO
United crown a perfect week by twisting knife into their Red rivals Eamonn Sweeney
THIS HAS been a perfect week for Manchester United. On Tuesday, Leicester conclusively ended Chelsea’s faint title hopes. On Wednesday, Paul Pogba’s winning wonder goal at Fulham showed United’s most expensive player can play a major role for the rest of the season.
On Thursday came Burnley’s win over Liverpool. And on Friday news that a hamstring injury will put Kevin De Bruyne out for six weeks was followed by word that Jamie Vardy faces a prolonged spell out after a hernia operation.
Yesterday came a second crack at a Liverpool team whose midweek defeat suggested they’d been let off the hook the previous Sunday by a lack of boldness on United’s part. This time round Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s team prevailed in a manner which illustrated a significant change in the balance of power between the old rivals. That was good enough in itself but there were also a couple of bonuses, the first being Mason Greenwood’s return to form. Last season the teenager was electrifying, his 17-goal haul seeming to set him up for even greater things this term.
Instead he’s suffered a sophomore slump with just four goals from 23 games while being subjected to intrusive tabloid finger-wagging over some minor infractions. Before yesterday, he had gone 10 games without scoring.
But you wouldn’t have thought it given the calm authority with which he swept home a shot from the right corner of the box after 26 minutes. Three minutes into the second half, he turned provider for Marcus Rashford and looked back to his best throughout.
Bonus No 2 was that United were able to give Bruno Fernandes a bit of a rest and still win. It was the 66th minute before the Portuguese star appeared but within a dozen minutes he was winning the game with a sublime free-kick. United are no longer a one-man team but Fernandes seems indispensable.
His thunderbolt came after Liverpool had enjoyed their best spell of the game. But even when the champions enjoyed the lion’s share of possession they never looked in control. They currently resemble Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal when the Gunners began going off the boil.
There’s lots of good stuff but the performances lack their previous rigour.
Maybe that’s not surprising. No title-winning team has ever dominated like Liverpool did last season. No runner-up has ever garnered as many points as they did the previous season while also winning the Champions League. Their sustained excellence over the past two-and-a-half seasons has earned the team 71 wins and just seven defeats from 95 league matches while playing a hugely demanding up-tempo, high-pressure style of football.
Now it seems all this effort is catching up to them. No-one looks wearier than the two full-backs who used to be the indefatigable beating heart of Jurgen Klopp’s team. In the 81st minute, Aaron Wan Bissaka didn’t just beat Andy Robertson to a 50/50 ball on the right, he hared away from the Liverpool man before turning back and beating him again after reaching the end line.
No-one looks wearier than the two full-backs who were the indefatigable beating heart of Jurgen Klopp’s team
Meanwhile, Luke Shaw persistently thundered past Trent Alexander-Arnold to reverse the previous Rolls Royce v Cart Horse dynamic between the duo.
Shaw was abetted in this by master of metamorphosis Marcus Rashford. Having reinvented himself off the pitch as the great hope of English social democracy, Rashford has added another string to his bow on the pitch. Initially not much more than a speedy striker with an eye for a ball over the top, he’s now displaying a Cantona-style ability to make chances for others.
His through ball for Greenwood for the first goal was a thing of beauty, an earlier one which Alisson just got to before Edinson Cavani not much less so. Yet this broadening of his game has not distracted Rashford from his primary purpose. Alisson has rarely been so perfunctorily dismissed as when the scourge of the Tories calmly slipped the ball past him in the 59th minute.
Pogba is changing too. The Frenchman’s typical performance in the United jersey seemed to belong to a highlight reel rather than a live match. There was always something memorable, a sweeping pass, a piece of trickery, and then nothing for long stretches.
Substance
But yesterday’s performance was as high on substance as it was low on style. The first United goal began with Pogba’s tackle as Roberto Firmino tried to shoot. A 34th-minute dispossession of Mo Salah as the Egyptian entered dangerous territory was just one of the other moments which suggested Pogba might be channelling the spirit of a certain cranky Corkman.
Defensive cumbersomeness remains a problem. The ease with which Firmino’s pass bisected Shaw and Victor Lindelof to create Salah’s first goal and the flatfooted reaction to the Cavani loss of possession which led to the second showed that United are not yet the finished article. But if predictions that Solskjaer was not up to the job look less than prescient, so do claims that Glazer parsimony had left the manager with a team about four players short of being able to challenge for honours.
In reality, this expensively assembled team full of quality footballers should have been playing like this long ago.
Now the force is with them. This has been the happiest week in the managerial life of Solskjaer. The way things are going for United, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Harry Kane injured himself getting out of the bath last night.