Six dilemmas facing Manchester United following their Liverpool shellacking
Manchester United beating Liverpool at Old Trafford was such an unexpected result that it prompts several questions about what they do next.
It was a performance that nobody expected on a night that had the potential to be ruinous for Manchester United. With thousands protesting with a march before the game, all the ingredients seemed to be in place for their clash with Liverpool to be another match to be thrown onto the pile marked ‘Manchester United 21st Century Old Trafford Disasters’, but this didn’t happen.
United are now above Liverpool in the league, have their first win of the season, and a potential pathway towards rediscovering a little poise after many months when the good times returning to Old Trafford seemed as far away as ever. But all of this was so unexpected that Liverpool aren’t the only team with questions on their mind following this match. The only difference is that United’s dilemmas are somewhat happier than those facing their rivals.
1) To what extent to which was this United being good, and to what extent was it Liverpool being bad?
The evidence of our own eyes was that Manchester United were far better than a Liverpool team who were, frankly, flattered by only losing this game by a one-goal margin. But when we consider just how poor Manchester United were in both of their previous league games so far this season, the question of how much of what happened was down to Manchester United being good and how much of it was down to Liverpool being bad feels valid.
Because the truth of the matter is that Liverpool did make it easier for them than anyone reasonably expected. The lack of midfield cover for Trent Alexander-Arnold gave United’s attacking players more space to move into than they would ever have believed, while the suspension to Darwin Nunez robbed their opponents of a player who would likely have made a substantial difference.
To a considerable extent, none of this matters. You can only beat what’s put in front of you, and Manchester United achieved this comfortably, with their only moments of caution coming after Mo Salah pulled a goal back for Liverpool. Only then did the game start to look like what had been expected, with Liverpool’s forward players buzzing around putting United’s defence under pressure.
2) Is Rashford, Elanga and Sancho Erik ten Hag’s attacking solution?
Well, it certainly looked like it in this particular match. Marcus Rashford, Anthony Elanga and Jadon Sancho – three players whose youth makes something of a mockery of United’s recent policy of signing strikers who are well into their thirties – were all outstanding, with an extra bonus being how effectively Erik ten Hag managed his options, with the withdrawal of Elanga for Anthony Martial at half-time proving particularly inspired.
It hasn’t been an easy year for any United players, and Marcus Rashford in particular has found himself increasingly in the firing line over his long-standing loss of form, to the point that there has been a real possibility of him leaving the club altogether this summer. This threat has surely receded with this performance from United and this performance from Rashford, and rotating these four attacking players looks like a viable option for Ten Hag in a way that it didn’t before.
3) To Ronaldo or not to Ronaldo, that is a question
All of which leaves a huge question mark hanging over the head of the the forward who was dropped so that these three could play together. Cristiano Ronaldo wants out of Old Trafford, and seeing a United attacking formation actually playing well together without him may make his departure from the club more likely.
In all the excitement of beating Liverpool in the league for the first time in four years this may have been overlooked somewhat, but with United not having another home Premier League fixture until September 4, after the summer transfer window closes, the Liverpool game might even turn out to have been the swansong for his second spell at Old Trafford.
But good performances can have strange effects on people. Ronaldo might yet decide that he wants to stay, if the team has a chance of significantly improving upon last season’s performance, and there certainly hasn’t been much substantial interest in signing him from clubs who could fill his ambitions of one more year – at least – of Champions League football.
So somewhere the top of Erik ten Hag’s ‘to-do’ list may well be what to do with Ronaldo next. Should an offer come in, do they accept it and just get rid, as may have been expected previously, or do they retain his services and continue to try to fit him into their system?
As he’s already proved this year, he has the capability of being an extremely disruptive presence, and Ten Hag could be forgiven for wondering whether this result is the opportunity he needed to jettison a player who scored a lot of goals last season, but who seemingly remains ill-suited to any system that requires a lot of pressing. Critically, the manager has bought himself a little space to implement the system that he wants. But no parties who may have an interest have much time before the closure of the summer transfer window.
4) Where does Casemiro fit into the equation, if United’s midfield is functioning this effectively?
The arrival of Casemiro from Real Madrid has already been derided as a typical Manchester United Hollywood signing, a 30-year-old who had not been on anybody’s radar for the whole of the summer suddenly arriving for £70m, the second most expensive transfer of a player over the age of 30 since Cristiano Ronaldo left Madrid for Juventus for £80m in 2018, and on an expensive five-year contract.
And if there was a feeling of desperation – that, with their lengthy pursuit of Frenkie de Jong having apparently come to nothing, they needed a big signing, any big signing – about his arrival before the Liverpool match, then it’s worth asking whether they may have jumped the gun a little with this signing. Because for all his qualities as a player – and he has many – would Ten Hag risk changing the team that put in Manchester United’s best shift in months and months to accommodate his shiny new signing?
Of course, the modern game is a squad game, but Scott McTominay – the obvious player to make way for Casemiro – did improve substantially upon his previous performance against Brighton and Ten Hag may well be looking at that improvement and wondering whether he can use this competition for a place to further improve a player who became a little bit of a laughing stock throughout the last few dismal months of last season.
5) What now to do about the captain and the captaincy?
One Manchester United player who didn’t have a very pleasant evening was Harry Maguire, who was dropped to the bench, only to see a completely new defence which had never played together before comfortably deal with an attacking trio who had been trailed as being capable of inflicting a whole new level of damage upon a defence that had already been skilfully filleted by both Brighton and Brentford in their previous two matches.
The partnership of Lisandro Martinez and Raphael Varane worked extremely well and this means that, having started the season as club captain, Maguire could be looking at spending most of the autumn on the substitutes’ bench, with a World Cup just around the corner.
Of course, this might all be considered a Harry Maguire problem rather than a Manchester United problem, but it still raises questions for Erik ten Hag, even if United’s policy concerning the persistent rumours of Chelsea interest in the player has thus far been ‘not for sale’.
This is a position that the club could easily revise before the closure of the transfer window, but it would be cutting things fine to get a sale sorted by then – presuming that they even wanted to – so, even though Maguire doesn’t strike us as likely to be a particularly disruptive presence in the dressing room when things aren’t going well, this is a situation that will have to be managed.
Meanwhile, Bruno Fernandes looked like a captain.
6) What happens now to the anti-Glazer protests?
Now, let’s all just be honest with each other for moment, shall we? Most of us neutrals were half-expecting a perfect storm of Manchester United Crisis from this match, weren’t we? And with thousands having joined the protest against the owners and the, umm, ‘mixed’ reaction to Casemiro being introduced to the crowd before the match – a mixture of polite applause and Glazers out songs – the possibility of a new crescendo of anger and disenchantment might manifest itself. Perhaps Mark Goldbridge’s eyes would pop clean out of their sockets with disgust? Who knew what the evening might bring? But then the actual match started and football, as it has a tendency to do, made monkeys out of a lot of us.
And this raises perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the fallout from this match. What does happen now to the anti-Glazer protests? It’s hardly as if protesting the owners of the club is anything new. After all, those protests started before they even took ownership of the club in the first place, and their arrival at Old Trafford was one of the key catalysts for the formation of a whole new football club, FC United of Manchester.
Unhappiness at Old Trafford is nothing new. It’s only just over a year since protests against the European Super League and the Glazers’ rush to suckle on that particular teat caused the postponement and rescheduling of the 2020/21 iteration of this very fixture. But with talk of the Glazers refinancing the cost of renovating Old Trafford through a Barcelona-esque sale of future TV rights and rumours surrounding the possibility of Sir Jim Ratcliffe buying a shareholding in the club with a view to full ownership, it did at least feel as though this could be the right time for these protests to actually cut through.
But what does happen to those protests now? Can they maintain their momentum after such a result? It’s entirely plausible that beating Liverpool has benefited the Glazers more than anybody else. Good performances on the pitch usually have a stifling effect on such protests, and considering the extent to which pressure had been building upon them in recent weeks, it’s likely that they’ll be grateful for the fire-break afforded to them by beating their biggest rivals.
The answer to these questions tie into the huge question marks that hang over the fallout to this result. Have Manchester United actually improved that much over the course of just a couple of weeks, or was Liverpool’s performance so tepid as to make winning a near-inevitability? Will winning this match end up being seen as a glorious one-off, or will Manchester United one day look back upon this result as the start of a truly new era, with the right coach to bring the best out of what is – despite what we’ve all seen this last couple of years – a very talented and able group of players?
The issue that Manchester United supporters without the memory of a goldfish will already be aware of is that they have been here before, after winning the FA Cup in 2016 and the Europa League the following year, for example, or when they finished as surprise runners-up to Liverpool just two seasons ago. False dawns at Old Trafford have become as natural as sunrises and sunsets, and one of Erik ten Hag’s most important single job is to break that cycle of sporadic excellence followed by considerable hubris and, ultimately, disappointment.
Beating Liverpool so convincingly was an excellent result borne of an unexpectedly cohesive team performance. But Manchester United supporters already know that one swallow does not a summer make. They’ve been here before, and while the dilemmas facing Erik ten Hag after this match are far better dilemmas to have than those he’d have been looking at had they lost, Manchester United’s success or otherwise this season will not be defined by this one moment alone. The Glazers themselves are certainly not out of the woods as a result of this one result, but protesting their ownership may become a slightly more difficult sell.
