The reality of football is much more fluid than we think
Manchester United are back, baby, they’re back
It was a sight to behold when Manchester United beat Arsenal this past weekend. The great Premier League rivalry of the late 90’s and early 00’s reignited at Old Trafford, with both teams on the upswing, but having in each other their biggest test of the season. It was “the place to be” like it hadn’t been in a long time. The excitement was real. It made you grin, in wonder, of what could be the outcome. Not because they’re both terrible and therefore who cares but because both gave and give the feel of possibility. Neither are destined for the title, yet after Arsenal’s “5 out of 5” start, Manchester United proved that they, the Red Devils as well the Gunners, aren’t headed for predictable disaster either. The wild and such fun aspect of this all is that just a couple of weeks ago United were. It was gonna take about 26 transfer windows for Manchester United to be properly rebuilt. Because everything supposedly takes forever. Nothing changes overnight. The coach has to get his ideas across. The players, new and old, flops and wait-and-sees, have to get use to each other. All those tired-out clichés. But life is in so many ways fluid – it is not in many others, yet it is in something as operationally fickle as football, where you can spend, chop and change, pretty much on demand when, and especially when, you are Manchester United. Myth busting is fun. We were all so convinced that ten years would weigh too heavy. It turns out, Ten Hag weighs heavier.
Nothing about the display from Sunday was necessarily perfect. Flaws, problems, don’t evaporate in their entirety always. But Manchester United are outrunning their problems right now. It started with our still Premier League leaders, Arsenal, going at it – looking to pounce, knowing that they themselves are a better team than their opponents of that evening. It showed. The fluidity, the one-twos, the poise and purpose, the ability to dominate, to push forward, was more evident in Arsenal. And the edge cut United when Odegaard cut Eriksen off the ball and found with such grace, such spine-tingling precision, Gabriel Martinelli on the run, with space ahead. The nuclearly biting and incisive Brazilian winger had it all in his hands, in his boots, in the pace and in the dexterity of his steps to beat the defender and to beat De Gea. He did. And it was marvelous. The culmination of that play just so satisfying. Then came the ultimate football anti-climax. The drudgery of VAR masturbation. Of slow-motioning of plays until you find what you were sent out to look for: the change of the initial decision, the second-guessing, the zoom-in to infinity. And it was overturn. Something that could’ve been signaled a foul in the moment but shouldn’t have in the after moment.
As Rory Smith, of The New York Times, said on the Monday’s edition of The Totally Football Show, “That [the Odegaard foul] was neither a foul nor not a foul. And there is a lot of situations in football like that. And until we, as a football culture, can accept that — and I count myself in that, I count fans in that, players, managers particularly. Everybody has to accept that there are things that are both kind of fouls and kind of not fouls. And that’s the nature of the game. But if you’re trying to litigate each of those searching for an objective truth, all you’re gonna find is problems, because it doesn’t exist.”
All sports are imperfect but these kinds of plays, so subjective, so on the edge, on the limit line between being and not being, are feeling so much more tiresome in football than many of the other sports. In the NFL, for example, this felt to me, while watching the coming together of Odegaard and Eriksen, like a referee call that wouldn’t have been “confirmed” but that would’ve “stood”. It’s not “sureful” enough, but the evidence isn’t strong enough to overturn either. What football has described as “clear and obvious error” or not so. It was overturn. And it all changed.
Quite like it seems it all changed after getting obliterated by Brentford – Manchester United turned the corner. The polemic refereeing call gave them that little zest, that little self-shove, to know that just like Arsenal they aren’t not who they were – they don’t have to anymore. The bald Dutchman has given them the possibility of being who’d they like to be, just like all good coaches do, time and time again. All that felt unrepairable when Brighton, and then Brentford worse so, broke them, cracked them, summitted them. It was only one guy that was not at the club for the cloBBerings of the first two weeks… Eriksen was there, Lisandro was there. It goes beyond him, but the tiny help, that something different, was the guy who sent Arsenal packing to halftime. Described by international football expert and Brazilian-native Héctor Kriok as the most talented Brazilian player since Neymar, Antony struck. The pep in his step, the dribble, the delight of someone wrapped in an outer-body platonic debate about football prices and economy bubbles. But here, in the moment, as Héctor and me and others observed together at a Málaga pub, Antony became the phenom he can be. An imperfect but capable United had knocked down the league-leaders.
A league, so good so far, that has been almost a cliché in and of itself for this first month of competition. “How great is the Premier League, am I right?” We sense that Manchester City will destroy everyone in their path, yet after six weeks of play, they are in second place. Liverpool have slipped probably enough to not seriously contend this year for the championship. And the “xGrophecy” of Brighton is finally coming together with the team sitting in the last Champions League spot. And Leicester are indefensibly terrible beyond what we expected, and Bournemouth have gone from okay to satanically awful to very good all of a sudden by flipping Nottingham Forest on their head and coming back from 2-0 deficit to win by 2-3. It’s crazy. It’s wild. And with it, Manchester United have themselves struck within the chaos, while the iron is still hot, and they might just become that who they have not been fully for 10-plus years: good. Who could have freaking thought.
That second Arsenal half was gonna be the biggest test yet. A team, United, that you’d think can easily still flounder and the boys with the cannon on their badge have proven this season that they can do the opposite: have calm, purpose and technique to come back and unpick a moving lock. They have, after all, started stellarly. They are very good. As such, both teams returned to the field prepared, Arsenal knowing they’d have to chase, to beat the game back in their favor. And they did. The passing, the finding of space, the movements, the notes finally hit right and Bukayo Saka shot at goal and a goal he got. The evenness of power, the tug of war, who would be able more. The pivot point on which we saw the explosion. How much of it can we cling onto in order to understand and perhaps even accurately predict the United future? Maybe not much. But this hit different, this felt distinct.
Emotions revved, the game embarked on its last half hour and both had little to lose, beyond Arsenal’s perfect start to the season. The win, however, meant oh so much. Beating their bitter rivals, showing that perhaps they are for real. And on the exchanges, on the pressure, on the build towards the target, trying to find the gap, the way… it all came beautifully together for Manchester United. They were able to sustain, to be pushed and on the counter break so damn fast and forcefully. In these game-winning bursts we found such great revelations. As fluidly as Bruno and Eriksen and Rashford combined, football changes, teams change and are able to break free not only of who they’ve been but who they, inexorably, feel they will be. It hasn’t been one month and United have gone from hopeless to having no psychological ceiling. Because yes, with only a couple of players, and a new coach, and some key lineup decisions things can change. Manchester United will continue on to be the dysfunctional club they’ve been all these years. The “process” wouldn’t by any means be necessarily better or have improved. But not everything you throw at the wall is the “same” thing. Erik Ten Hag, overnight, had gone from humiliated to elite all-capable manager. Things can change.
How could you go from Brentford to last Sunday against Arsenal? How is that possible so fast, if all the players were terrible… Ten Hag, the unironic master tactician that he is, has known how to adjust the verve, nuance and precision. Sometimes, it is small, obvious things that no one dares to do. Maybe if Cristiano would’ve been used as a second-half weapon Solskjaer would’ve succeeded. But also benching team-captain Harry Maguire was a bold but indispensable move the former Ajax manager made. Now Varane is coming back into his old self and now Lisandro Martínez is shushing the eye-rolling criticisms of his lack of height. De Gea is still god awful at long or even medium range passing but ETH has figured out how to adjust on the fly and get this thing, this project, at least rolling. Such as Malacia has rolled in remarkably seamlessly into the starting unit in place of Shaw. And Dalot is also being nudged into being solid-er. When you are able to touch on just the right keys and the right notes the melody is much less impossible than the doom and gloom ever-present at malfunctioning football super-institutions such as Manchester United seems to suggest.
New players, at least some new players, are almost always needed when you need to right wrongs as big as United needed to right. And they have not come cheap yet that’s what this club is good for after all: splashing the cash. The whole “lack of investment” thing was a comforting criticism but it was lazy and desperate. United might be terrible at sporting project management, and Old Trafford might indeed be falling apart as a carnival of rust but throwing money at it has rarely ever been the problem. So there have come Casemiro and Antony on top of Malacia, Lisandro and Eriksen. But even then, for as wildly overpaid as a couple of these players might’ve been, a whole load of them also left. After which, beaten by Brighton and Brentford, it all had seemed good for pretty much nothing. Again, that’s when we go down the rabbit hole rhetoric of this needing half a decade, or crazy stuff like that, for all this to be corrected, for the project to flourish. It may take them that long to win a league title, a Champions League title or they might not even win anything at all. But after The Solskjaer Experience of Vibes and the surreal hollowness of the Rangnick Experience, for United to once again compete with some seriousness is welcomed like rain in a desert. Or in some of these Spanish Castilian plains from where I’m writing this piece onboard of a train and where everything loos as dry as Manchester United’s trophy cabinet in the last decade.
But one last time, people undervalue the effect of good coaching. When I think about the concept, I go back over and over again to Pochettino at Tottenham. He inherited a wildly out of whack post-Bale team that has just derailed between Villas Boas’ incapability of figuring out that puzzle and later Tim Sherwood doing whatever it is that that man did. Yet three years after Bale left, in only his second season, Pochettino made Tottenham… Premier League contenders. They came as close to winning a championship as they had in decades. Sure, that was the “weird year”, and Leicester won it, and everyone else slipped embarrassingly. But even in that first season of his, Pochettino could not make Spurs get a grip with anything involving the defense. And one year later, they were the last team to be eliminated from title contention and Leicester were crowned champions. What happened from that one year to the next was not all that wholesale. Poch didn’t need years and transfer window after transfer window. He needed to do what he knows how to do: coach. And just a few pieces to make it all gel. Back then it was a central defender who had played at Ajax and that overnight catapulted Spurs into being a good defense: Toby Alderweireld. Now it’s Lisandro. Back then it was Eriksen finally finding his groove, his mojo, his spot, his precise but still fluid role in midfield/attack. Now… it’s Eriksen himself doing that same thing again. Next to another weird-fitting-with-him-but-actually-not-that-weird-in-practice attacking midfielder: Bruno Fernandes. Then it was Mousa Dembele. Both very good ball-drivers if not quite stellar positional passers.
But again, Lisandro played against Brentford, Eriksen did too and so did Bruno. Casemiro hasn’t even made a starting eleven debut. But good coaching, man… Good coaching. And myth busting. The myth that Manchester United needed all this time, needed forever, needed all these new players upon new players, needed all this money upon more money. Surely Ten Hag feels that he hasn’t even gotten going in comparison with how far he wants to take this team. But it’s there, the start, the proof that good coaching takes you far. And when you are elite at it, it shows, it really shows. How far it will show this Manchester United team along into this Premier League season is yet to be seen. It may well implode by the next game and all this optimism never to be spoken about again. It doesn’t feel like it. Which is a lot if you are referring to Manchester United.