WE’RE only a couple of months until Halloween so here’s an old horror story from the 1970s. POV: it’s late summer 1973 and you’re a major English football club, six years on from winning the league title while it’s only five – just half a decade – since you were crowned champions of Europe. Like all good tales that are unsettling, this one starts with only a brief glimpse of the bad stuff coming down the line. REVEALED: You are Manchester United Football Club and you win two of your opening three games, which doesn’t seem so bad. But then come three straight defeats, one of your meagre total of two goals coming from goalkeeper Alex Stepney, who is on penalty duty like some sort of David Bowie-era Hans Jorg Butt. Between a draw with rivals Leeds United in late September and a loss at Sheffield United on Boxing Day you win just once, 1-0 at home to Birmingham, with Stepney the scorer once again from the spot. The golden leaves are hurtling off their branches towards the ground and your goalkeeper is your joint leading goalscorer. Doesn’t sound promising, does it? It isn’t, you are relegated in April, a gigantic shock even in the rarefied egalitarianism of 1970s football. Manchester United Football Club. A Second Division side. Oops.
49 years later and Manchester United are in another jam. Rock bottom of the Premier League after two games, a home defeat to Brighton and a 4-0 existential crisis in Brentford last weekend. One goal scored (an own goal, naturally) and six conceded. Erik ten Hag is the first United boss to open with two defeats since the 1920s, and only once before have United begun a Premier League season with two defeats and that was 1992-93, a season rescued by narrative, laced collars and Eric Cantona. This is an entirely different prospect, a club reaping a whirlwind of baggy (not the Madchester type) post-Ferguson planning and an ownership structure that routinely profits from the club’s gigantic history but is happy to create no more.
Erik ten Hag is just the latest manager to walk into Manchester United and realise that a rubber-stamped philosophy and reformist zeal isn’t enough to turn around this tanker. And on Monday night he has to deal with the biggest test of any United manager’s year, Liverpool at home. Jurgen Klopp’s side are also winless after two games but their predicament feels much more short term, a combination of injury and rustiness which still should have seen them beat Fulham and Crystal Palace. Unusually for a bottom-half-of-the-table clash, Liverpool and United head into MD3 as the two clubs who’ve had the most shots from open play. But where Liverpool’s 31 efforts have a combined xG of 3.1, United’s 28 shots have an expected goals value of only 1.79.
United’s attack is misfiring, sure, but their defence is in the sort of panicked state that can usher in a genuine relegation battle, no matter who your noodle partner is. Six goals conceded from 3.1 xG is largely explained by the disasterclass at Brentford last Saturday, David De Gea letting the first through his haunted grasp from distance while the second came from the sort of bungled short goal-kick routine Sunday League football was rife with when the goal-kick rule was tweaked a few seasons ago.
Despite the argument your uncle was aggressively pushing at barbecues this summer, there are plenty of reasons why the short goal kick routine is increasingly adopted in contemporary football. Research has shown that attacks with a higher probability of good quality chance creation come from patiently drawing your opponent towards you and stretching the pitch. The supposed glory years of all 20 outfield players being stationed in and around the halfway line ready to compete for an incredibly pumped-up ball are increasingly rare, and we can all aesthetically celebrate that.
But to take part in the new paradigm you actually need to be able to pass the ball in a tight space with consistent accuracy. In Manchester United’s opening two games the main tactic has been for new signing Lisandro Martinez to play the all laterally to De Gea who then makes the second pass as the opposition closes in. The summer signing from Ajax has in fact taken almost twice as many goal kicks as his new colleague yet this feels like the wrong way to implement a valid. De Gea, one of the greatest shot stoppers the Premier League has ever seen but closer to Joe Hart than to Ederson when it comes to distribution, would surely be better making the initial non-pressured pass to Martinez or another team-mate and letting them deal with the press. It will be interesting to see whether they continue with the current approach against Liverpool, one of Europe’s most ferocious PPDA-merchants.
Should Monday’s game end in a draw or a win for the club who have won the Premier League more recently then it will be only the 20th time that Manchester United have started a top-flight season with zero wins in their opening three games. Two of the last three times it has happened (1992-93 and 2007-08) United went on to win the league but they were powered back then by Cantona and 2008-era Cristiano Ronaldo respectively. Neither of those players are currently available to Erik ten Hag. The club were relegated in 1931 and 1937 after three-game winless starts but United’s average finishing position in this scenario is 10th and that, based on current form and current squad strength, is probably about where the club rank in the current Premier League. However temporarily.
They’ve been overtaken – however temporarily – by the likes of Brighton, West Ham and Newcastle and ten Hag’s first task is to make his team as competitive as those sides before they can even think of challenging their more traditional rivals. Next May will be 30 years since United ended their long wait for a league title and 10 years since their most recent crown. History unfolds very slowly and then suddenly all at once; United need new stories just as much as they need new players.
