When Roy Keane was asked to compare Bruno Fernandes with Eric Cantona, he snorted that Cantona scored goals in big games while Fernandes did not.
English football does not have a game bigger than Manchester United versus Liverpool. The boy from Porto had not been asked to start this one but, once Mohamed Salah had pulled the tie level at 2-2, his manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, brought him on for the ineffectual Donny van de Beek.
Within a dozen minutes, Edinson Cavani had won a free-kick on the edge of the Liverpool area, using all his experience to persuade the referee that the challenge from Fabinho was a foul.
Fernandes stepped up to take it, talking to himself as he prepared the shot. When he delivered it, Paul Pogba ducked in the wall and the ball finished beyond the tips of Alisson Becker’s gloves.
Afterwards, Solskjaer remarked that after the Saturday training session, Fernandes had stayed behind to spend 45 minutes practising free-kicks, adding with a smile “so I rather expected him to hit the target.”
It is worth pointing out that doing extra training was something Cantona had done, much to the bewilderment of his team-mates who wondered why he bothered. The goal he scored against Liverpool in the 1996 final, displaying complete control on the edge of the area, was the answer.
All great games ebb and flow but this FA Cup fourth-round tie had been positively tidal. Once Fernandes intervened, the flow was largely one way and, had Cavani’s header not struck the post, Manchester United would have won by two clear goals.
Away from Wembley, these sides have met eight times in FA Cup ties since the war and on six of those occasions the winners have gone on to reach the final. Given the way Manchester United are starting to play, you would not bet against that sequence being maintained. Under Jürgen Klopp, the FA Cup is a competition where Liverpool have barely scratched the surface.
Since his arrival on Merseyside in October 2015, Liverpool have won or reached the final of every other competition they have entered. Klopp’s first four attempts to win the old pot saw him eliminated in the third or fourth rounds by clubs beginning with W – West Ham, Wolves (twice) and West Bromwich Albion. Last season brought elimination by Chelsea in round five.
After Thursday night’s defeat by Burnley, Klopp talked about Liverpool’s poor decision making. The build-up play had been good, the finishing was unrecognisable. Here, Salah scored twice and but for a fine save from Dean Henderson he would have become the first Liverpool player since Fred Howe in 1936 to have hit a hat-trick at Old Trafford.
The problems were defensive, which given their lack of specialist centre-halves is rather more understandable. “There was a lot of good things and some mistakes around the goals,” said Klopp. “If you want to win here, you have to be absolutely top and we were not.”
It was a game between a team that has forgotten what it can do against one that has remembered who it is. Frankly, you feared for Liverpool once they appeared in mottled turquoise shirts that seemed straight out of the 1990s, a dreadful decade for kit designers and one that is best forgotten at Anfield.
However, they were ahead before 20 minutes were up. It is an anomaly that neither Roberto Firmino nor Salah had previously scored at Old Trafford but now they combined beautifully. Firmino’s diagonal pass slipped the Egyptian through and he clipped it over Henderson’s sprawled body as if all Liverpool’s recent uncertainties in front of goal had never been.
Under Solskjaer, Manchester United have become a team that wins after falling behind, something they did with startling frequency in the Treble season, in which Liverpool had been knocked out at Old Trafford in the fourth round.
Now, with Marcus Rashford attacking hard down the left flank backed by Luke Shaw, Liverpool began to creak. A fabulous cross-field ball from Rashford to Mason Greenwood that taunted and teased James Milner as it skimmed the top of his head cracked them open.
Sooner or later, the absences in Liverpool’s central defence were bound to tell. An error from Rhys Williams and a pass from Greenwood that was every bit as good as Rashford’s had been, sent the people’s champion clear on goal. What followed was his 82nd for Manchester United, equalling the tally of one Eric Cantona. The sight of him disappearing down the tunnel with a knee injury was the evening’s only negative for his manager.
Liverpool rallied. Milner should have scored but scooped his shot into the Stretford End and then dummied a square ball for Salah to level. Liverpool seemed favourites to finish the tie off but they are in the kind of downward spiral in which everything goes wrong.
Klopp had described the defeat by Burnley, their first league loss at Anfield in nearly four years, as “a punch in the face.” This was a blow upon a bruise.
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