MIKE Dean’s appointment to the Manchester United/Arsenal game this weekend is a nice touch, as the only current referee to operate in the Premier League during seasons when these sides were crowned Premier League champions.
It’s been 14 and half years for Arsenal, seven and half for United. Once this fixture was the gleaming showpiece of English football, the staunchly aggressive heart that pumped blood through the league.
[MONTAGE] Martin Keown swooping down onto Ruud van Nistelrooy’s head like a deranged eagle, Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira squaring up in the impossibly tight tunnel at Highbury, the ferocious Mike Riley-approved leg-buckling opening to the match at Old Trafford in 2004 that saw Arsenal’s unbeaten run end at 49 games. If there was a single reason the Premier League swept around the globe as a must-have product, encounters between these two were it.
The contests arguably peaked in quality in 2009 when the clubs faced each other in the Champions League semi-finals. United’s 3-1 second leg win at the Emirates was a masterclass in soaking up pressure and hitting Arsenal on the break, led by Wayne Rooney and the two-goal Cristiano Ronaldo. United were on course to retain the European Cup, but haven’t won it since. Arsenal haven’t even played a Champions League game since early 2017; 46 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump.
So here we are in late 2020 with both clubs a work in progress to varying degrees. Mikel Arteta looked to be ahead of the curve when he won the FA Cup just months into his reign but while Arsenal hunker further into pre-planned defensive manoeuvres, becoming a team who have under nine shots per game and press their opponents at about the rate Newcastle do under Steve Bruce, United are, finally, definitively, on the way back. Can a season which already contains a 6-1 home defeat to Lads It’s Tottenham be classed as successful? Well, if you go to Paris and defeat the 2020 Champions League runners-up and then smash the 2020 Champions League semi-finalists and current Bundesliga leaders RB Leipzig 5-0 at home then yes, it can.
Sunday’s will be Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s 100th game in charge of Manchester United while the Leipzig match was his 55th win. Not perfect but also very much: not bad. Clubs will always be playing better or worse than their results suggest, and Solskjaer’s time as United manager has seen him lurch from one extreme to the other, with the narrative invariably playing catch-up. Just as the outside world decides OGS is “making progress” his side are embarking on a bad run and just as the game’s myriad voices announce that “enough is enough, Pochettino is *just there*” United are making the sort of leap forward the club’s fans have been craving since 2013.
We all know this deep down but sometimes it helps to see it spelled out in words or pictures. The graph below shows United’s fluctuating fortunes since the end of Louis van Gaal’s reign as manager, with the blue shaded areas the periods when United’s IRL goal difference (the red line) was better than their Expected Goal Difference (the yellow line).
The first huge blue zone was the time period described as “finishing second is one of my greatest achievements” by Mourinho, or ‘that season when David De Gea was some sort of supernatural octopus’ by supernatural octopus watchers. The downwards correction at the start of 2018-19 was brutal and Mourinho paid with his job. Enter Solskjaer who enjoyed one of the best caretaker manager spells the Premier League has ever seen, one which resulted in what seemed like a once-in -a-lifetime win away at PSG in the Champions League and a permanent contract.
The red zone that followed Solskjaer’s permanent appointment wasn’t some kind of regression to the mean but a complete reversal of fortunes, which saw United for most of 2019-20, up until lockdown, as one of the unluckier sides in Europe’s top divisions, “winning games on xG” but not seeing that translated into real world results. That flipped around when the Premier League returned in June and United's form saw them claim a top four finish.
The club’s inconsistency in the league so far this season can be seen on the far right but what the Champions League wins in the past 10 days have shown is a greater depth and variety to the Manchester United squad, which makes a sustained dip back into the red zone, in my opinion, much more unlikely.
Ups and downs? That’s football, you say and yes it is, but one of the issues for Solskjaer and others in his time in charge of United has been that either one of Manchester City or Liverpool (or both) have been rolling out perfect seasons, so any stumble from the Old Trafford side has been magnified beyond reasonableness. Dropped points used to be a minor flesh wound rather than immediately fatal.
Teams used to be able to put together runs after Christmas to win the league, United and Arsenal shared 13 league defeats in 1997-98 but still finished second and first respectively. As it stands United are 15th, City are 13th, Arsenal are 11th, Chelsea are 10th. Can you definitely rule any of them out of the title race right now?
Ultimately it comes down to this: Ole isn’t a perfect manager but you don’t need to be perfect in 2020-21. If you can beat Leipzig in your 99th game, you can win the Premier League in your 150th.
