Manchester United 4-4: The Elephant in the Room
On Remembrance Sunday, I attended a service with my children, who are both in the Scouts. As part of the commemorations, some of the youngsters shared stories about their ancestors and the roles they played in the two World Wars. One story in particular caught my imagination. A Scout told us about his great-grandfather, who had fought in Burma during the Second World War. Not just fought, either. He’d ridden into battle on the back of an elephant, with a machine gun mounted on top.
What an image. Imagine being on the opposing side, you’re making an attack down the enemy flanks and seeing that big fucker facing you down: a bloody great elephant, armed to the teeth, trumpeting his trunk. Fight or flight? You’d probably run for the fecking hills. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred quid. Just flee. Definitely don’t try and rile it.
It got me thinking about Manchester United’s defence: there was a time when opposing forwards must have felt something similar when they lined up against United at Old Trafford. Peter Schmeichel. Steve Bruce. Gary Pallister. Nemanja Vidic. Rio Ferdinand. Edwin van der Sar. Even bloody Gary Neville. Warriors, every last one of them.
These days, opposing forwards must feel like they’ve wandered into one of them Kitty Cafes. You know the places – you pay an arm and a leg to sit in a cafe with all kinds of cats big and small wandering around you and trying to stick their faces in your sandwich or get the cream off your cake. Harry Maguire has taken on the appearance of Bagpuss, while Diogo Dalot resembles an unruly kitten chasing a ball of string. Round and round he goes, occasionally catching sight of the thing he’s supposed to be pursuing, before disappearing off in entirely the wrong direction. Lammens is like that cat who keeps letting the mechanical toy mouse scurry right between his legs. Mazraoui is like that odd hairless one. Martinez the nasty one who takes a claw-bared swipe at your toddler as they toddle past on chubby legs. Shaw is that one who’s always curled up asleep in the corner, oblivious to all the commotion. De Ligt is the one with wheels for back legs because his back’s jiggered.
Organising United’s defence must be like herding cats. And, as everyone knows, you can’t herd cats. You certainly can’t defend properly with them.
An unserious scoreline for an unserious football club
Four-four: Manchester United have now been involved in two 4-4 draws in the space of a year. The Guardian described it as an “unserious scoreline”, which is a rather wonderful description of a thoroughly unserious football club. Before this the only 4-4 I can remember at OT was against Everton 14 years ago. Then, the result was so damaging it cost us a league title (subject to city being stripped of titles and us being awarded them). This time the point gained moved us up to 18th place in the table. If Mount had managed to do better right at the last, the extra two points would have seen us claw our way out of the Premier League drop zone. How the mighty have fallen. We’re like elephants trying to pick our way across plasterboard. Ooops.
Above: the Villa weren’t exactly parking the bus. We weren’t either. We don’t even have a bus, it’s been replaced by a hoverboard. Cost-cutting.
Anyway: eight goals. Four conceded. Twice two goals behind. Twice clawing our way back. Apparently, this was the first time in Premier League history that a team had recovered from a two-goal deficit twice in the same match. Which is one of those statistics that sounds magnificent until you stop and think about what it actually means. To achieve something so unprecedented, you first have to be absolutely dreadful. Then briefly brilliant. Then dreadful again. Then brilliant again.
This is what we’ve become. A club where every match seems to produce another record, almost invariably one we’d rather not have. Yesterday, United were two goals down earlier than at any previous point in a Premier League match. Another unwanted first to add to the collection. There was also a statistic doing the rounds suggesting we’d conceded 30 goals already this season, putting us among the feeblest defences in Europe’s major leagues. Thirty goals by November. There are colanders with better defensive records.
And yet, somehow, we scored four ourselves and rescued a point. The trouble is, I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to celebrate the comeback or be furious that it was necessary in the first place. I managed both. Several times.
The curious case of Diogo Dalot
Now, about Dalot (again). Let’s get something straight. He had an apocalyptically bad game. There is no point pretending otherwise. But he is not a left-back. He never arrived at Manchester United with marauding left-back printed on his user manual. He’s a right-back, and a fair-to-middling one at that. Asking him to perform a role he isn’t suited to, week after week, is not suddenly going to transform him into Patrice Evra. It is not his fault that United’s hierarchy failed Michael Carrick in the transfer window by neglecting to bring in a specialist left-back. Luke Shaw’s durability was always going to be an issue. Frankly, it was something of a miracle that he managed to keep going for as long as he did last season, particularly with the additional matches (or was it? Was he just staying fit in case he got a World Cup call-up?). And yet here we are, acting surprised that our makeshift solution isn’t working.
Dalot has become a lightning rod for everything that’s wrong with the team. When he was substituted yesterday, he was subjected to a dreadful reception from sections of the Old Trafford crowd. The jeering was embarrassing. I sit in front of the exec boxes in the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand, where Dalot’s father is often in attendance. He’s obviously his son’s biggest supporter, but over the years he’s become a United fan himself, every bit as passionate and fanatical as people who’ve been following the club for four decades. There’s a TV in the box and he’s often on hand to let us know what’s going on when VAR intervenes in a game – without him we wouldn’t have a scooby what was going on, or what the game had been pulled up for.
I thought about him having to listen to that reception. And I thought about Dalot himself. Yes, he’d played terribly. Yes, supporters have every right to be frustrated. But there’s something deeply unpleasant about turning on one of your own players like that, particularly when he’s being asked to do a job for which he is patently unsuited. There were plenty of other players who defended appallingly yesterday. And there are plenty of people above them who should be answering far more difficult questions.
Dalot’s still shit though.
Confessions of an early leaver
Of course, before I get too sanctimonious about the behaviour of other supporters, I have a confession to make: I left early. Eighty-seven minutes on the clock. Hope extinguished. Patience exhausted. I got up from my seat and walked out of Old Trafford and I abandoned my team. And almost immediately, I regretted it. I was making my way out of the ground when the noise told me something extraordinary had happened: Joshua Zirkzee, a man who seems to actively hate scoring goals or getting in the box, had scored. Four-three.
Suddenly, the impossible seemed possible again. I tried to get back into the ground, but there was no way through. I was outside, listening to the growing roar, knowing that United were going to do what United have always occasionally done: conjure something from absolutely nothing. And then they did: four-four. And I missed it. Serves me right: you should never leave a football match early. Especially not a United match. Especially not when the club’s history is littered with moments that seemed impossible until they happened. And especially not when, twice in less than a week, this team had already demonstrated an ability to recover from two-goal deficits.
I knew all that and still I left. It was a dereliction of duty. A personal failure. An abdication of responsibility. In other words, I briefly conducted myself with all the resolve and strategic foresight of United’s boardroom. We all need to take a long, hard look at ourselves.
Voting with our feet
Talking of leaving early, before the match I picked up a flyer encouraging supporters to walk out after 21 minutes, marking 21 years of Glazer ownership and the slow-motion destruction of MUFC. I didn’t notice any mass exodus at that point. But towards the end of the game, as hope drained away, there were empty seats everywhere. The ticket office had told me that tickets for the match had been on open sale, which is hardly a reassuring sign for a club that once seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for supporters willing to pay to watch it.
There comes a point when people simply stop putting themselves through this, even United supporters. Even those of us who have spent decades convincing ourselves that the next match will be different. The drama of the past week has been extraordinary. But drama isn’t the same as progress. And supporters cannot be expected to keep paying increasingly ridiculous sums to watch a club lurch from one self-inflicted disaster to another.
There were banners protesting against the ownership, including one declaring: “We don’t want a new stadium, we want new owners.” Later, supporters held up individual letters spelling out: “It’s your funeral, not ours.” At least, that’s what I eventually worked out. For a while I thought it read: “It’s your funeral, no tours.” Then something like: “It’s your fun era l notto urs.” Some kind of Latin motto, perchance, like the one on the Everton badge – “Nil Satis Nisi Optimum” – which roughly translates as “please give us something, anything, to shut up those Koppite Gobshites for five minutes.” Or, let them say nil. Anyway, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it and this Countdown Conundrum kept me going for ages during a particularly soul-sapping period of the game.
But the sentiment was clear enough: supporters are angry. And they’re running out of patience.
Forty years of hurt
I genuinely don’t think I’ve known United to be as low as this. You have to go back around 40 years to find a comparable league predicament. Back then, a certain Alex Ferguson had just arrived at Old Trafford. Whatever happened to him? Well, he brought us unimagined riches and glory, but he also bickered about horse jizz and helped usher in the merchants of doom who are the Glazers. So a mixed bag there.
What’s not a mixed bag is results. One league win in ten matches. Still in the bottom three. Records tumbling with such regularity that somebody should probably start collecting them in a book: Manchester United: The Complete History of Things That Have Never Happened Before, Until They Happened to Us. Which might be what this column eventually becomes.
And now comes the international break. Once again, we head into a fortnight wondering whether the manager will still have a job when domestic football resumes. Michael Carrick might survive. He might not. We were in much the same position during the last international break, only to find ourselves temporarily distracted by the ruling on Manchester city’s financial conduct. Suddenly, for a few glorious days, we could stop thinking about our own miserable predicament and concentrate on the noisy neighbours. It was a welcome diversion.
This time, I’m not sure what could possibly rescue us from having to confront the reality of Manchester United. And here’s the real problem. Even if Carrick goes, what changes? The manager might be the most visible target, but he’s operating within a structure that has consistently failed to provide the tools required to do the job. There’s no Vidic or Evra waiting to arrive in January and transform the defence. And there certainly isn’t an elephant with a machine gun. Just the same old problems, dressed up in a different tracksuit.
Introducing AI John
Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to AI John. On Friday, I had cause to contact Manchester United’s ticket office, where I was introduced to the club’s latest technological marvel: an artificial intelligence customer service adviser called John.
AI John was having a difficult afternoon. He seemed to have only the vaguest understanding of what I was asking him and responded with a succession of increasingly bizarre suggestions. Eventually, I managed to get through to an actual human being. The person on the other end laughed when I described my encounter. Apparently, AI John always goes a bit haywire on Fridays. I suggested that perhaps he was desperate to get down the pub. And, in fairness, who among us hasn’t felt like that after a week with Manchester United?
But there’s a serious point here. My family has had plenty of dealings with the ticket office over the years, largely because my dad is something of a Luddite when it comes to technology. Digital tickets are not his natural habitat, and the staff have regularly helped him navigate the mysteries of modern football administration. They’ve been absolutely brilliant.
I’m not talking about the club’s ticketing policies, prices or allocation decisions. That’s another argument entirely. I’m talking about the people answering the phones. Real people, who understand the problems supporters encounter and do their best to help.
And now we have AI John: a cheap imitation of something that was working perfectly well in the first place. It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for the modern United. Why invest in quality when you can replace it with something cheaper, less reliable and fundamentally incapable of doing the job? Why employ experienced people when you can introduce a machine that apparently spends Friday afternoons hallucinating about ticketing arrangements?
It’s the philosophy of Scruffy Jim the Dingle Bastard writ large: cut costs, reduce standards, call it progress. Perhaps AI John could have a go at left-back, he couldn’t be much worse. Although, knowing him, he’d probably suggest I collect the ball from the ticket office on Tuesday.
The elephant in the room
And so we return to that elephant in Burma: a magnificent beast, carrying a machine gun into battle. An image of strength, determination and, presumably, a fairly terrifying sight for anyone standing in its path. Once upon a time, Manchester United possessed something of that same aura. Opponents feared coming to Old Trafford. They knew they’d be facing a team that wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t back down and wouldn’t make life easy.
These days, we concede four goals at home and are expected to celebrate because we somehow manage to score four ourselves. We are simultaneously heroic and hopeless. Magnificent and miserable. A football club capable of extraordinary moments, yet apparently incapable of the ordinary business of defending, planning or making sensible decisions.
And the elephant in the room isn’t really the manager. It isn’t Dalot. It isn’t even AI John, although I wouldn’t trust him to organise a piss-up-wake at a funeral for a brewer who’s letting you borrow his brewery for free. It’s the people running Manchester United. Because you can change the manager, change the formation, change the players and change the stadium. But until the decision-making improves, we’re going nowhere. The elephant is still there, only these days, nobody’s riding it. And somebody’s half-inched the machine gun and replaced it with a water pistol.
By Andrew Kirby, Author of Seven: Manchester United’s Iconic Shirt, Pitch Publishing, out in January SEVEN: Manchester United’s Iconic Shirt — My New Book – Andrew Kirby Storytelling | Stories Worth Telling
The post Manchester United 4-4: The Elephant in the Room first appeared on Republik Of Mancunia: A Manchester United Blog.
