OPED | AGENCIES – That was much, much better from Manchester United thanks in large part to their new goalscoring talisman Scott McTominay. But thanks also to the generosity of an infuriatingly soft Chelsea team
- A significant and deserved win for Manchester United, but a huge night in the Old Trafford reign of Erik Ten Hag. A day he started as favourite in the Sack Race ended with a victory in which every big call he made was vindicated and in which the team showed the heart, commitment and above all togetherness the absence of which was so brutally exposed at Newcastle.
With Steve Cooper’s Nottingham Forest going down 5-0 at Fulham and Roy Hodgson turning on his own club’s fans after Palace’s 2-0 home defeat to Bournemouth, Ten Hag would probably be safely off that particular top spot even without this much-improved performance from his team. Until those two get the actual sack, anyway. - The identity of Manchester United’s goalscoring matchwinner would, before this season have come as a surprise. Now it’s just what he does. Scott McTominay’s reimagining as a kind of Lampardian goalscoring midfielder has been a wildly unexpected change of tone, but for club and country it’s working out. He’s now United’s leading scorer this season and even though that’s a statistic that arguably says even more about several other players than it does McTominay it’s still quite something.
They really were goalscorer’s goals too, if that makes even the slightest lick of sense. A smart control and finish from 12 yards out to open the scoring and then a late run into the box to outjump and overpower a defender before heading forcefully home to win the game in the second half. - And McTominay could have had many, many more goals, such was the frankly astonishing ease with which he especially but United generally were able to get around, behind and beyond an alarmingly fragile Chelsea backline. McTominay had seven attempts on goal in all – although two came in quick succession in the same incident featuring an impressive-yet-also-kind-of-straightforward-really double save from Robert Sanchez.
But that wasn’t even the most attempts from a United player tonight. Alejandro Garnacho had eight – including an inevitably doomed attempt to recreate his Everton insanity. In all, United rained down 28 shots on Sanchez’s goal and while that was at least in part due to the quality of their football on the night, it’s also just far too many for a team with any kind of pretensions to be allowing. Especially given the general goalshy nature of United’s Premier League season to date. - There will be two concerns for United after this broadly excellent evening’s work. The first, most obviously, is that those 28 efforts translated only to two goals. Had Chelsea packed their own shooting boots the result could have been very different given the chances they themselves were able to carve out on the break. Given the overall balance of the game was so firmly tilted United’s way, it would have been absurd but it could easily have happened.
The second concern will be that only one of those 28 attempts on goal came from Rasmus Hojlund during his 83 minutes on the pitch. He actually started the game brightly and that one attempt on goal was a decent one, forcing Sanchez into a save that looked better on a second watch than it had at the time, when the game was still goalless. But his early prominence receded and it’s now 764 minutes and counting for Hojlund as he awaits that first Premier League goal. - But while that number does illustrate Hojlund’s own struggle, it also points to precisely where Chelsea’s main weakness on the night was to be found: the full-back regions. Even that Hojlund chance came when he took up a spot down the left channel to catch Marc Cucurella unawares.
Quite why Cucurella was deployed at right-back with Reece James on the bench is one of many mysteries Mauricio Pochettino may be required to unravel from a disappointing and disjointed performance, but Levi Colwill at left-back was equally culpable. - Both Garnacho and Antony revelled in the opportunities Chelsea’s makeshift full-backs provided for them, though. Both turned in perhaps their most-rounded and best overall performances in Our League to date. Both were hugely influential in what was comfortably United’s most convincing attacking performance of the Premier League season.
- Antony’s first major contribution, though, was tinged with farce. It was he who won an early penalty for Manchester United, awarded by VAR after being understandably but incorrectly waved away on field. Much like the penalty Anthony Martial won for United at Everton a couple of weeks ago, it was an example of VAR doing things rather well. It didn’t really look like much of anything at all in real time, but one replay was enough to show Enzo Fernandez’s boot crunching down on the top of Antony’s. Undoubtedly a foul and therefore undoubtedly a penalty.
- It remains one of those that still slightly irks us because the crime and punishment feel so distinctly at odds. Fernandez was distinctly unwise to make a challenge that carried such risk and offered so little reward given where Antony was headed but it’s still just hard to square the offence with a punishment that equates to something like 0.75 of a goal. In pre-VAR days it kind of sorted itself out because they were just so often not given. Now it’s an offence that you know will see a referee hauled to the monitor and asked to have another look, with the outcome of that process almost inevitable. Even when VAR is correct we’re really not sure it’s always an improvement. Funny game, football.
- Anyway, happily for everyone, Bruno Fernandes agreed and decided to do one of those penalties with a run-up that absolutely demands you stick the ball in the back of the net. Instead, Sanchez refused to fall for the dancing horse performance, guessed right and made a smart save. To summarise, then: we think it was a foul, we think VAR was right to award it, we’re sort of not really happy about that because the punishment doesn’t really fit the crime, and are therefore glad it was saved. Clear? Not really. But we do sort of reckon it makes sense in our own heads. There are lots of fouls in the penalty area where it doesn’t really feel like it should be a penalty.
- We’ll stop talking about the penalty in a moment, but it was our favourite part of the whole match. Which makes the match sound a lot worse than it was, because it was very decent indeed. But this is a bug-bear of ours and we’re warming to the theme now. A big part of why it was so funny, and also kind of why we don’t really like the penalty decision (despite it being a decision that, as the laws currently stand, we think was entirely and uncontroversially correct), is that Antony essentially won a penalty by accident after getting his decision-making and touch all wrong. When the ball came to him it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to go on the outside, where all the Chelsea players weren’t, rather than back inside, where all the Chelsea players were. And yet, that perplexing decision ended up with a penalty. Which was missed anyway. So… was it the right decision in the end or not? What does any of it mean? Does any of it mean anything?
- United didn’t have long to wait to turn their dominance into a deserved lead in any case, and it was a beautifully taken goal by McTominay, bringing a loose ball under instant control with his right before swiftly drilling home with his left. We’ve come away from this game with the distinct sensation that an awful lot of its elements looked a lot better on replay than they did in real time, and this touch and finish was definitely another example. Currently working on a theory that this is because the match was co-commentated by the magnificent Ally McCoist, a man who is constantly more impressed by everything on replay and the only co-commentator in this or any other sport so cheerfully and frequently willing to change their mind upon closer inspection of an incident.
