AMEX STADIUM — Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer demanded goals from a group of players who were already scoring quite a lot of them, and they duly delivered several more goals on Tuesday.
It was a slightly unexpected outburst from Solskjaer, who on the eve of the game against Brighton had warned his young front three that if they did not keep scoring he would look elsewhere for alternatives.
This despite his two main forwards, Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford, sitting on 19 goals each for the season and on the verge of becoming the first United front two to score 20 each in a campaign for almost a decade, since Dimitar Berbatov and Javier Hernandez.
His 18-year-old from the academy, Mason Greenwood, makes up the trio and is enjoying a phenomenal breakout season which got even better with the opening goal of an eerily, unsettling United-of-old performance that leaves Brighton only six points clear of relegation.
United, meanwhile, are on a 15-game unbeaten run stretching either side of lockdown and victory edged them into the Fifth Place of Champions League Uncertainty, as it shall from hereon in be pithily known.
Manchester City and about a third of the Premier League are eagerly awaiting the verdict from the Court of Arbitration for Sport on City’s appeal of their two-year Champions League ban, which is due in July.
The three points took United ahead of Wolves on goal difference, joint on 52 points and only two points behind fourth-place Chelsea, who do have a game in hand.
Even Leicester, on 55 points in third but also with an extra game to play, could need fifth place to secure a Champions League place that look nailed on before the break as their post-lockdown form tanks.
Gary Neville, on commentary for Sky Sports, was some 20 rows in front of me but could be heard exploding with excitement at Greenwood’s strike on 16 minutes.
It was some goal: a pass from Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Greenwood did the rest, quick feet and a lethal low finish from inside Brighton’s penalty area.
With 13 goals now this season in 40 games, the comparisons begin and the omens look good. Against Brighton, he became the first Manchester United player to score six Premier League goals in a single season before turning 19.
Marcus Rashford, 22, had scored only 12 goals before he turned 19 and Greenwood is still three months shy of his next birthday.
Cristiano Ronaldo did not score more than 13 goals until his fourth season at United, although this was back when he was known for too many step-overs and no end product.
To add to the Greenwood frenzy: two years ago, when Jadon Sancho was the same age, the Borussia Dortmund winger was only just getting in the Bundesliga side’s first-team and scored once in 12 appearance. The following season he netted 13.
The Greenwood trajectory knows no bounds.
Solskjaer is demanding more goals from his front three – let’s not forget Martial also scored a hat-trick two games ago – but the great United sides of the Norwegian’s era found goals from everywhere and he will be pleased that Bruno Fernandes already has six in 13 games since signing in January, adding two more against Brighton.
His first, United’s second of the evening on 30 minutes, was the product of trial and error. Not long before the strike, he met a sideways pass from Paul Pogba first-time and found the bottom of the right post with a low effort aimed towards the bottom corner.
For the goal, Pogba played an almost identical pass to an almost identically-placed Fernandes who this time found the sweet spot he had previously tried for.
His second, United’s third shortly after the second half resumed, was the sort of direct, deadly counterattack play that United used to be renowned for and Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have since mastered.
On the break, Harry Maguire header out of his own box, Nemanja Matic with a chest and volley pass to Greenwood on the left, his cross found Fernandes who volleyed past Brighton goalkeeper Mathew Ryan.
Fernandes’s six goals for United combine with the 14 he had already scored for Sporting Lisbon and the Portugal national team this season before he arrived at Old Trafford, and if the former Manchester United striker-turned-manager is desperate to add goals to the team then he seems to have found them in a big signing – £47million – and an academy teenager. Oh, and the two forwards he already had scoring regularly this season.
But they had better keep it up – or else.
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