Welcome to the self-destruction derby. Tell yourself you’re embracing the chaos and shunning control to create the illusion of choice. Is it great fun? You bet. Are any of these players actually performing well? Erm…did we mention that it’s great fun?
There are some opponents who require complete perfection to be beaten; here, anything approaching competence would do and there were still more occasions than not when both Arsenal and Manchester United failed to meet that watermark. We waited 90 minutes not to find out which team was better but which was defensively less unsound. Arsenal, as it happens.
At times during the second half, when countless passes went astray in the space of a single minute and supporters seemed unsure whether to laugh, cry or groan at the embarrassing fare on offer, you had to remind yourself that these two teams are battling to get into the Champions League.
Nuno Tavares looked haunted after his first mistake and made so many more that it became hard to watch and you begged for a mercy substitution. On the other side, Cedric Soares was repeatedly beaten by Jadon Sancho. Aaron Ramsdale had probably his worst performance in an Arsenal shirt. And that’s only the team that won 3-1 and eventually breezed through the last 15 minutes.
It is generally accepted wisdom that the full-back is the most important – or at least most symbolic – position in modern football. In no other player do we see the rise in physical fitness and stamina, the expectancy for tactical education and versatility and multifunctionality more evidently.
Has a fixture of this significance between two clubs of this prominence ever had a weirder quartet of right and left-backs? For all the toils of Tavares and Soares, Alex Telles was at fault for the first goal and gave away a penalty for the second. Diogo Dalot lost his man for the opener. The entire game had the pervading sense that if you simply stood where a full-back was supposed to be you would eventually score. Tavares himself and Cristiano Ronaldo tested the theory and were rewarded.
We should not expect Mikel Arteta to care much; nor will Arsenal fans. Even a manager whose catchphrase became “trust the process” will happily ignore the messy method when the end result is this sweet and the starting XI so far from its best. They gave themselves a mountain to climb after three consecutive defeats and they have strapped on a pair of crampons since. They still have a chance of salvaging what they let slip.
Arsenal were undoubtedly fortunate. Fortunate that the penalty decisions mostly went their way and the one that went against them was flunked by Bruno Fernandes; fortunate that United hit the post twice and the bar once and Gabriel blocked a shot that was destined for goal; fortunate that their slack passing in their penalty area was not punished. But mostly fortunate that they ran into a top-four contender capable of producing many more mistakes than them.
Manchester United were good at defending once, more recently than you think. They kept 14 clean sheets last season and in 2019/20 conceded only three more goals than the meanest defence in the Premier League. Of all the myriad ways in which this club’s farcical self-inflicted collapse is represented, the vast spending on defenders to somehow become worse at conceding goals is surely the most emphatic.
The latest ineffective solution was to drop Harry Maguire, who cost them £80m. He joined Phil Jones, Eric Bailly and Aaron Wan Bissaka as substitute defenders, a quartet bought for £180m in transfer fees. Not only does that speak of United’s gross wastage in the transfer market and the culture of the club that seems to drag players down, it also puts into some context the £150m budget which Erik Ten Hag reportedly has this summer.
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Maguire is clearly in very little form at all, a man whose face has the look of someone asked to multiply 829 by 78. Perhaps taking him out of the team temporarily will indeed allow him to rebound into better shape. But to suggest that United’s defensive problems are down to him is nonsensical. Raphael Varane and Alex Telles both kicked thin air for Arsenal’s first goal. If anything, United looked worse not better.
The incompetence was catching. Bruno Fernandes’ form has been a cause of some dismay given the doubts over how he fits into this and the next manager’s system – he is a spiky, sulky figure when all is awry. But Bruno at least usually makes the most of the moments. Here, the only time we saw a pep in his step was during the run-up for a dire penalty miss.
But then what is new? You have a club whose manager is a long-term builder who was appointed as a short-term firefighter and is now seemingly happy to detail the hundred different ways in which his successor will find life as hard as he has. You have a collection of players bought at vast cost who somehow lose all ability to play as a team and in doing so lose their confidence as individuals. And you repeatedly produce performances that – unfairly or otherwise – suggest that you don’t care enough about the calamity into which you are increasingly slipping.
Arsenal were below par against Manchester United, occasionally comically so. They will be relieved by victory, joyous even, but probably not proud of it. But then that’s entirely the point: teams don’t need to be anything better than average to beat this United disaster class of ’22.
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