16 Conclusions from Man City 3-0 Man Utd: Haaland, Foden, Doku joy, but more grim United misery

There was to be no repeat of last season’s late nonsense as a good-enough Manchester City were able to turn victory into a procession against a bad-enough Manchester United.

It was a game that offered a glimpse of renewed joie de vivre for Phil Foden and Erling Haaland but which left all the longstanding questions about Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United getting only louder and more urgent.

How long can he and they go on like this? It really shouldn’t be this easy to play against United. Should it?

1) An uncomfortably large game for Manchester City at this early stage of the season became a comfortably routine one, with Manchester United remaining thoroughly committed to being their own worst enemies.

Liverpool’s latest late show had left City staring down a barrel. Lose another home derby, and they’ve lost an awkward number of home derbies given the general relative standard of both teams over recent years, and they would find themselves nine points adrift of the title favourites and facing the prospect of falling the same distance behind the second favourites when taking on Arsenal next weekend.

There really shouldn’t be such a thing as a must-win game in mid-September but on the back of a 24/25 season that did so much to shatter the aura of Pep Guardiola’s four-time defending champions, this really did feel like it might be precisely that.

2) Ultimately this would turn into a procession. The awkwardness and unfamiliarity that defined the alarming defeats to Spurs and Brighton was washed away.

This is a City thing trying to do things a little differently and it’s clearly not yet reached its final form. But there were clear glimpses here, just as there were in a 4-0 opening win at Wolves that now feels like it happened several months ago, that City can go again this season. Whether they are capable of the consistency of performance required to compete with the top two is still a question with no definitive answer, but get this game wrong and there might have been it.

Or, put another way: City couldn’t play themselves into a title race here, but they could have played themselves out of one.

3) That never truly appeared likely from the moment Phil Foden put them in front and celebrated with the joy of a thousand frustrations being expunged at once.

In the previous 58 Premier League games at the Etihad when City had scored first they had won 50 and drawn seven. The fact the other one was this fixture last season felt of only passing trivial relevance.

City had, though, been largely second best up to that opening goal. There had been a half-chance from a tight angle for Erling Haaland inside the first 20 seconds, rudely interrupting Peter Drury’s painstakingly prepared opening soliloquy, but United had more than held their own in the opening exchanges.

Right up until they didn’t, Jeremy Doku dancing past a static Luke Shaw in wonderful style before showing the wherewithal to take advantage of his good fortune when his initial cross was blocked straight back to him.

He did all he could in that instant and helped the ball into a useful area, where Foden was arriving to plant a tricky header into the far corner from a cross that had no pace on it to work with.

4) It was a fine goal from City’s point of view but another in the long list of United catastrophes. Shaw, as Roy Keane put it, basically threw in the towel at the first sight of Doku’s snaking hips, while Bruno Fernandes’ long-standing shortcomings as part of a midfield two were highlighted yet again by the ease with which Foden was able to run beyond him unfollowed and seemingly unnoticed.

The free nature of the header certainly helped lower the difficulty tariff significantly.

5) And that just feels like a recurring theme with Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United. They are seemingly stuck with a system and a method where creating clear chances of their own is agonisingly, painfully difficult, requiring Herculean effort and a series of events all to fall into place perfectly, yet their opposition is able to simply pick a path through time and again with seemingly very little hard labour.

United had their share of 4v3 and 3v2 moments, yet never did any of them really seem to amount to anything. Never was the end result a clear and obvious chance.

Yet for City it seemed so straightforward. All it took for United’s defence to be pulled entirely out of shape was for Doku to pop up in an unexpected position and Foden to make a run he’s made a million times before, and which dozens of players have now made to take Fernandes out of the game as a defensive obstacle.

6) You really do wonder what United should or even can do about this. Until the second goal, at which point the wind went from the sails entirely, United had been firmly in the game. Haaland had spent more time playing as a centre-back in the first eight minutes of the second half than as a centre-forward, admittedly a course that would be corrected across the subsequent 15 minutes.

And yet still the thought remained: how, exactly, were United going to – or even really planning to – to turn any of this vaguely encouraging football-adjacent activity into a clear chance of forcing an equalising goal?

7) It’s a question Ruben Amorim must answer more generally. How are United actually trying to score goals? Because it really does feel for long periods that they are simply relying on somehow having some tidy possession in nominally encouraging areas will somehow magically turn itself into goalscoring chances.

And that’s not happening. Amorim now has 36 goals and 31 points from 31 Premier League games. Of his eight wins as a Premier League manager, three came against last year’s historically bad relegated trio and another against newly promoted Burnley this season.

The body of evidence that this simply isn’t working against seasoned and settled Premier League opposition grows and grows.

What are he and United actually trying to achieve here? And just how many players must come and go at vast expense in pursuit of what really is starting to look like an impossible dream?

Here’s the Premier League table since Ruben Amorim’s appointment:

8) But while existential dread feels like a reasonable response for United here, at City a renewed sense of what life was like before last season’s (relative) unpleasantness.

The fact Foden and Haaland were the key architects should not be lost on anyone. Jack Grealish had to leave City altogether to begin Looking Like He’s Enjoying His Football Again. Foden and Haaland have taken the other route.

This was the most eye-catching appearance from Foden in such a long time even without his goal, while Haaland too had been engaged and present throughout, from that Drury-scuppering early chance to his expertly taken goals via enterprising build-up play and defensive contributions at 1-0 that really should not be forgotten with the game still then feeling like it was in the balance.

9) Having helped protect City’s advantage, the manner in which Haaland would extend it to a position of total safety was entirely on brand. Up to an including the absurd but seemingly mandatory easy chance missed in between the two far harder chances he actually scored.

One can only marvel at just how many goals Haaland might score if he wasn’t seemingly contractually obliged to miss the easiest chance he has in any given match.

Quite how or indeed why he contrived to slide the ball directly at the post when presented with an entire goal to aim at from two yards out is a mystery man is perhaps not meant to solve.

10) Let’s focus on the goals he did score, because they were lovely things. Apart from the United elements, which we’ll get to in due course.

The first was created once again by Doku, who spun Leny Yoro before playing Haaland in. Shaw, who had been so bamboozled by Doku in the first half was now reduced to having his presence barely even acknowledged as Haaland simply barrelled past him before clipping the ball beyond the onrushing Altay Bayindir.

This was a goal that highlighted the two contrasting skills that make Haaland such a menace. The sheer uncomplicated and at times seemingly unstoppable speed and strength that get him into these positions, and the guile and craft and surgeon’s touch he possesses once he’s muscled his way through.

11) The third goal arrived soon after that astonishing miss and said something else about Haaland: how little that kind of miss affects him when he’s in the right frame of mind. The unerring inevitability with which he thumped home a far tougher chance from a far tougher position was striking.

What was also striking was just how utterly United had lost the run of themselves by this point. Yes, they were chasing the game, but if the first two City goals were stories of how alarmingly easy it was for City to pick their way through and around seemingly well-populated defences, the third was alarming for just how quickly United’s back three entirely disappeared. One misplaced United pass and one well-weighted City one were all that was required for Haaland to find himself as both the closest man to Bayindir on the pitch while also still being two yards inside his own half.

A ridiculous situation and just a maddeningly easy chance to give up for a team that finds creating their own such hideously hard work.

12) While United lacked inspiration throughout, the lack of perspiration in those key moments was another concern. Bernardo Silva was the latest victim required to offer his half-time thoughts to the Sky cameras and he suggested that United were clearly a better team this season than last.

We suppose it would take a brave player indeed to risk hostaging himself to fortune in a match only half finished, but it was also pretty hard to spot what, precisely, he might have spotted to have reached that conclusion.

Because this really did seem like a United performance we’ve all grown accustomed to seeing time and again under Amorim, a team collapsing in on itself under the weight of a system that at this point starts to look like it’s actively been designed to highlight and exacerbate weaknesses while minimising strengths.

13) The speed with which even known, proven Premier League talent can be reduced to mere shadows of their former selves by this club is really quite something. Bryan Mbeumo is not the player we know from Brentford. The absent Matheus Cunha is not the player we know from Wolves.

The players Amorim has felt it necessary to bomb out all seem to rediscover themselves the second they escape Old Trafford.

You really do have to start to wonder if there is an actual number of new signings that can fix this football club, or if it’s all now a case of good money after bad.

14) Mbeumo did have one standout moment, but even that was one that only served to highlight United’s failings.

One quirky storyline coming into this game was not knowing with any real certainty who would be in either team’s goal, both clubs having made late moves for a new goalkeeper as the transfer window closed.

United opted to stick for now with Bayindir, who was largely blameless for the goals he conceded, while City did hand a debut to the reassuringly enormous Gianluigi Donnarumma. He had been as good as he’d been required to be in dealing with lot little United could throw at him, but served notice of his top-tier shot-stopping ability with a fingertip save to deny what looked for all the world like being a goal that would have given United a potential foothold in the game and a huge boost to Mbeumo at this tough early stage of his United career.

There will be tougher games ahead for Donnarumma – both in how they test his strengths and his perceived weaknesses as a Pep Guardiola keeper – but the chance to make a really significant contribution on debut was expertly taken having looked like it probably wouldn’t arrive.

15) We’re big fans of Jeremy Doku and it was nice to see the fun and trickery that he has simply refused to have beaten out of him by the City Machine earn tangible rewards in a big game.

There is a sense here that he has become the Manchester City player Jack Grealish somehow could not. That his ability to be their game-breaking ace in the pack while operating outside the Pepball norms is tolerated and even encouraged in a way it never quite was for Grealish.

The focus will inevitably and understandably fall on the goalscorers, both of whom had their struggles last season even if Haaland’s version of struggling still results in what are on paper still startling returns.

But it did feel like this could be the start of something quite big for Doku in a City team built slightly different and perhaps more to his liking.

16) United, meanwhile, have now even broken Gary Neville. Previous United defeats have made him sad or angry or angry and sad, yet here he was struggling to feel anything at all. He felt nothing about a nothing performance.

When you’ve even managed to crush Neville’s gentle spirit, you really should be ashamed of yourselves.