At around this time last year, Manchester United players, staff, and fans just wanted to our turd sundae of a season to end.
A fifth straight trophyless season. Our lowest point total in Premier League history. Three managers in one season. Things were so bad, the team cancelled its year-end awards ceremony and banquet because, let’s face it, the only thing to celebrate was that the season was over.
What a difference a year makes! This year, there was plenty to celebrate:
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After back-to-back 1-0 league losses, Manchester United’s Top Four aspirations are hanging by a thread. United need three wins in their last four matches to be certain of clinching a spot in next year’s Champions League.
It’s certainly doable. United have three matches left at home, where they’re the Globetrotters, as opposed to the road, where they become the Washington Generals. Their matches at home are all pretty winnable, with Wolves, Fulham, and a shambolic Chelsea set to visit in the coming weeks. Their road match, on paper, is also winnable, as they’ll get 14th place Bournemouth.
Then again, they’ve looked so toothless and impotent in their last two matches that nothing looks like a gimme at this point.
Against Brighton, United couldn’t convert their chances ultimately got held scoreless by a team that has flummoxed them all year. In fact, the last time United managed to score against them was in August, when Alexis Mac Allister put it in his own net in Erik ten Hag’s first match in charge.
On Thursday, a late Luke Shaw hand-ball doomed United, allowing Brighton to beat David de Gea from the spot with nearly the last kick of the match (surely, a bit of revenge for Wembley — also an eerie parallel to what happened in 2020, when United were awarded a penalty after the final whistle blew and Bruno Fernandes converted it for an unlikely 2-1 win).
Then, on Sunday, United, once again, failed to convert their chances and were doomed by a David de Gea a howler. De Gea, who has committed a league-leading four errors this season that have led to goals, seems determined to lose out on his contract extension, but it’s not all his fault. Anthony Martial, Jadon Sancho, Antony and Wout Weghorst have been erratic all season, and Marcus Rashford hasn’t been the same since his groin injury. You can’t even blame the defense, which is being held together with duct tape and Krazy glue right now.
So here’s hoping fifth-place Liverpool can do us a favor and drop some points down the stretch. Let’s see, they play Leicester and Southampton on the road and Aston Villa at home. Dammit. Guess we’ll have to see what our guys are made of.
When teams are at or near the top of the table, they rarely talk about a draw as a point earned. Especially if they’re playing at home against a team that entered the weekend in last place.
But Manchester United’s 0-0 draw Sunday with Southampton definitely fit that description. That’s what happens when you play for more than an hour with 10 men, thanks to a Casemiro red card.
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Given the gigantic leap forward Manchester United has made this year, it’s easy to forget that they’re still, very much, a work in progress. Despite the clear success of winning the League Cup, knocking Barcelona out of the Europa League, progressing to the quarterfinals of the F.A. Cup and sitting in third place in the Premier League, Manchester United were always at least one or two years away from truly contending for multiple trophies and going toe-to-toe with the best clubs in the world.
United got a pretty painful wakeup call on Sunday, getting annihilated at Anfield by a score of 7-0.
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Thanks to a vicious Andy Carroll tackle during Manchester United’s 3-1 victory over Reading in the FA Cup last Saturday that, somehow, escaped a booking (although the Liverpool flop and Boyzone fanatic did pick up two yellows later), Christian Eriksen will be out for most of the rest of the season.
Surely, United are screwed, right? Eriksen has been one of the club’s standout performers this year and his creativity and guile have been instrumental in the team’s uptick in form. Without him, our dreams of winning silverware are shot, right?
Maybe. But at least United were able to put a contingency plan in place.
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Ralf Rangnick’s spell as interim manager was a failure.
His tenure in the Manchester United dugout finally came to an end on Sunday after yet another listless effort — this time, losing at Crystal Palace 1-0 in a stadium where they had never lost a Premier League match. A season that began with so much promise and genuine excitement, had turned into such a nightmare that most people just wanted it to end, consequences be damned. That United managed to back into a Europa League place thanks to West Ham losing summed things up pretty well.
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You’d forgive Manchester United fans like yours truly for living in the past. These last six years have been painful – especially for those of us who came of age during the Sir Alex Ferguson era, when the club collected trophies the way I collect coins. From Ferguson’s appointment in 1986 to his retirement in 2013, United won 38 trophies, including 13 Premier League titles and two UEFA Champions League crowns.
His finest moment came twenty years ago, this week. United played Bayern Munich in the Champions League Final held at the Nou Camp in Barcelona. Both sides were chasing a historic treble, having won their respective leagues and primary league cups. Both sides were evenly matched and loaded with talented players, however United were slight underdogs heading into the match, owing to suspensions to team captain Roy Keane and playmaker Paul Scholes.
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Manchester United sacked Mourinho on Tuesday morning before training began. Club legend Ole Gunnar Solskjær has been named caretaker manager for the rest of the season, whereupon the club will appoint a permanent manager – maybe Mauricio Pochettino of Tottenham, ex-Real Madrid boss Zinedine Zidane, or Mourinho’s BFF Antonio Conte. Or maybe someone else. Who knows?
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If history is any indicator, then it’s going to be a very long and painful season for Jose Mourinho and Manchester United.
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It’s probably fair to say that Daley Blind was kind of an afterthought when he was unveiled alongside Radamel Falcao on September 11, 2014. El Tigre had been one of the best strikers in Europe, and his arrival on a loan/option-to-buy deal generated real excitement among the United faithful. Blind, on the other hand, was a good player but hardly a marquee star. A £13.8 million signing from AFC Ajax, he was, seemingly, only bought because of his rapport and familiarity with then-Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal.
Four years later, as Blind prepares to return to Ajax in a deal worth, potentially, £18.1 million, it’s fair to say that he contributed far more to United’s cause than either Falcao or Angel Di Maria, the other major acquisition in the summer of 2014. With three trophies to his name, as well as many instances of professionalism, heads-up play and selfless determination, he will always be remembered fondly by the United faithful.
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The Europa League Final was already shaping up to be the biggest match of the post-Sir Alex Ferguson Era at Manchester United. And that was before Monday’s terrorist attack in Manchester at an Ariana Grande concert.
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“He is a modest man who has a lot to be modest about,” Winston Churchill reportedly said about political rival Clement Attlee. Of course, Attlee got the last laugh, defeating Churchill in the 1945 parliamentary elections, but the (possibly apocryphal) put-down lives on in political lore.
Churchill’s quip was on my mind as I read A Season in the Red, by the Guardian’s Jamie Jackson. The book, which was released this month in the United States, chronicles all of the various missteps and mishaps from David Moyes’s disastrous 10-month stint at Old Trafford. The book, which covers both Moyes’s ill-fated tenure, as well as the first year of Louis van Gaal’s reign, is written primarily from the perspective of the press corp covering the team during that tumultuous two-year period following Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement.
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“Is that skinny kid with the bad alpaca-like facial hair the guy we just bought from Atlético for £18 million?”
I got to see one of David de Gea’s first starts for Manchester United. I went to watch United play Barcelona in Washington, D.C. during United’s pre-season tour of the United States in 2011. The match took place several months after Messi, Villa, Xavi and Iniesta dismantled Sir Alex Ferguson’s last great United team in London during the Champions League Final. The 20 year-old, rail-thin de Gea had just signed for the club to replace United legend Edwin van der Sar, and he looked like an overgrown tuft of grass standing in his green kit on the Fed Ex Field turf.
(more…)During my year-plus writing about soccer for Soccerlens, I had the opportunity to cover many, many English Premier League, UEFA Champions League and international matches. I saw many memorable goals during that time, but one always stood out:I did a live-blog for this match and this is what I wrote then:
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About Me:
- Former Lawyer.
- Current Journalist/Writer/Editor.
- Author of "Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House," published in 2018.
- Husband, father and dog-lover.
- Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Manchester United supporter.
- Chicago via Pittsburgh, New York City and several others.