A poor team, poorly run with no direction. Even pundits are struggling to stay fascinated by a club’s perpetual non-success“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”Yes, I would. I would probably do that. It becomes easier...
Lack of future certainty in Ralf Rangnick’s side is resulting in failure not only defensively but also in their nerve and will If there is good news for Manchester United on a bleak afternoon it is that their performance was good in parts. Admittedly those parts were few and far between and confined almost entirely to the first half, but that is still better than the derby at Old Trafford in November.The use of Bruno Fernandes and Paul Pogba as central attacking players, to the extent it caused Manchester City problems, worked, at least before half-time. But the problem is that none of that much matters if you’re going to defend like the visitors did. Continue reading...
City’s rivals, still in limbo after bungling the task of replacing Alex Ferguson, are proof of the pitfalls of a poor succession planMany years afterwards, Pep Guardiola would joke that the reason he never took over at Manchester United was because he couldn’t understand Alex Ferguson’s accent. The pair went for dinner in New York in September 2012, when Guardiola was on sabbatical and pondering his next move. Over a luxurious meal and fine wine – all paid for by Ferguson – they talked falteringly about football and life and the future.“My English is not so good,” Guardiola later said, “and when Sir Alex spoke quickly I sometimes had a problem to understand him. That’s why maybe I didn’t understand...
Cristiano Ronaldo cut an isolated figure for Manchester United against a team he has hurt countless times in the pastThere was a moment just before half-time at the Wanda Metropolitano when Cristiano Ronaldo stood on the penalty spot, delivered a shrug of the shoulders, pulled a face and raised a finger: one, just one. None of his Manchester United teammates were really looking his way and even if they had been, there was little they could do about it, and so he walked slowly back out of the area, shaking his head, alone. It was a journey he would embark upon often.All the way to the end, in fact, when he was the first player off, throwing back his arm...
Amid the missiles and the fury, Jadon Sancho and Paul Pogba gave Ralf Rangnick’s side some form of momentumThis was an afternoon of blood and roses in Yorkshire, a fun, bruising, furious mess of a game. Midway through the second half there was an interlude where six players joined in a kind of rolling, whirling maul close to the centre circle, bodies entwined like a multicoloured octopus writhing on the quayside, the ball punted, thrashed, semi-forgotten.At times Manchester United almost seemed to get a hold on the day, to take the air out of this fury, only for a misplaced pass or a splash of the sodden pitch to leave them chasing back once again. But by the end it...