This is an excerpt from The Score, a weekly column on all 20 Premier League clubs by i’s chief football writer Daniel Storey. Sign up here to receive the newsletter every Monday morning.
It’s hard to know how much we should apportion credit to Manchester City and how much of Sunday was merely a damning indictment of Manchester United given the gulf between the two clubs.
Those second-half statistics bear repeating because they are so humiliating: 21 per cent possession vs 79. No shots vs 14. No shots on target vs five. That Manchester United only conceded twice after the break should be something to cling to, such was City’s dominance. But then that only exacerbates the embarrassment. City used to be noisy neighbours. Now it’s United who are drawing the curtains and taking the phone off the hook in case anyone calls.
Ralf Rangnick arrived with a plan, a team of midfielders who would press as a unit and force City into shorter passing sequences than they would like. It worked in the first 30 minutes when United provoked mistakes and were a threat on the counter. But City were merely waiting for the press to drop in intensity, which it was always going to do. At that point they picked passes and crafted attacking moves as if they were playing at double speed compared to their visitors.
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They reflect the club, a statue to gross wastage, reactionary thinking and a transfer policy that focuses on who is famous and expensive and who other big clubs purport to want. That is so weak, so pathetic a policy that it becomes anti-policy; it shows.
But you can never excuse a lack of effort. We can understand that being passed off the pitch is demoralising and nobody likes chasing shadows at the end of a match that was supposed to be competitive. But Gary Neville was right to call out the lack of application and effort. There were thousands of supporters in the away end who paid good money to at least witness a team trying. United chase a global fanbase but what must any of them thought about such abject surrender?
That too is a reflection of the club. At Liverpool and City, those two clubs who United used to call their peers, they would not stand for this. They – the supporters, the boardroom, the staff – would demand better, they would not stop until they had achieved it and they would be listened to.
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Can we be confident in the same route being followed by United, a club where history and notoriety and revenue is everything and nobody seems to notice that the team is either unable or unwilling to compete. Good luck to whoever agrees to walk into the lion’s den next.
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