United Hammer home Champions League hopes
UNITED will have prepared to thwart Craig Dawson from scoring at a corner. What they could not have prepared for was Dawson scoring for them at a corner.
With the Reds’ amateurish defending at set-pieces exposed again by AC Milan, the irony was they benefited from their aerial prowess against a team whose only method of attack was airborne.
United weaponised it via a Bruno Fernandes inswinging corner and Rochdale-born Dawson inadvertently showed his Greater Manchester roots by putting the ball in his own net.
On days when he is not called upon from 12 yards, Fernandes is still United’s matchwinner from dead-ball situations.
It was apt that another grind of a game was settled by an own goal. The Reds have now served up eight goalless halves in their last 12 - and one of their four goals in that run has been from open play.
David Moyes demonstrated again why he should never have been considered for, never mind anointed, United manager in 2013. He is winless in 15 from the away dugout at Old Trafford and West Ham acted as though they were wielding a knife in a gunfight.
That respect, bordering on reverence, has prevented Moyes from presiding over a Premier League win at United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea in almost 20 years of top-flight management in England.
Once West Ham stop punching above their weight, their supporters are unlikely to countenance the artisan approach.
United seldom win comfortably on domestic shores and West Ham trailed them by six points at kick-off, had taken United to extra-time in the FA Cup last month and softened them up for an hour at the London Stadium in December.
Their analysts celebrated Dawson’s own goal like the Greeks breaching Troy.
Leicester knocked United down to third a few hours earlier on Sunday, but now Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s men have returned to their familiar perch of second - still 14 points behind City with a game in hand.
Three wins from three represents a laudable return against a vastly improved West Ham, though the football continues to be largely unwatchable and last week’s derby victory an anomaly.
Bragging about clean sheets is not the mythical ‘United Way.’
Solskjaer is down to the bare bones, picking two goalkeepers on the bench and allowing Daniel James and Marcus
Rashford to play into regression. United did not make a substitution.
Dean Henderson demanded a ‘good start’ and it was anything but. Harry Maguire bit his lip for 20 minutes until he snarled like Sean Bean.
United constantly spread the play to Luke Shaw, their standout performer for the umpteenth time this term, and Fernandes railed against the riskaversive midfield, dropping deep to survey the landscape and find the leftback had annexed his own acreage against West Ham’s wing-back system.
They are the only riders in the race for the Sir Matt Busby Player of the Year award.
It is too late now for Solskjaer to trial a more innovative midfield axis than two of Fred, Scott McTominay and Nemanja Matic. If Donny van de Beek regains fitness for this week’s knockout ties in Milan and Leicester, he has about as much chance of starting as his namesake of the Osmonds. Paul Pogba was so effective in January United cannot help but yearn for his return.
Mason Greenwood was the brightest of a front three that continuously swapped roles until one of them tuned into the same frequency as Fernandes, the youngster drawing an exceptional fingertip save onto the post from Lukasz Fabianski.
He smacked the post again in the second- half and a rusty Rashford’s stint as the ‘9’ hampered Greenwood.
United were too lopsided and overreliant on Shaw’s charges into the lefthand channel. Aaron Wan-Bissaka’s virtuoso performance in the 9-0 dismantling of Southampton was, like the result, an irregularity and the right-back was out of sorts.
Declan Rice crunched into an AngloScottish 50-50 with Scott McTominay that he initially struggled to get up from. The pair are inextricably linked amid
United’s admiration of Rice and, had McTominay not been swayed by his father’s Scottish roots, they would have been competing for the same role at England level.
United have not bought a senior player from West Ham since the fraught transfer of Paul Ince in 1989.
Rice lacks Ince’s athleticism and presence but his reading of the opposition’s play is arguably the best of the existing Premier League defensive midfielders at just 22 years of age.
His leadership, even with the captain Mark Noble recalled for his first league start in 2021, was apparent in stressing the need for West Ham to retain possession better, an approach usually anathema to Moyes whenever he was in the away dugout at Old Trafford.
West Ham tweaked their play following Dawson’s aberration without recording an attempt on target.