They’re behind you. No really, they are. For Manchester United, what had looked not so long ago like a gentle jog to the line in the Premier League, maybe even – really, this wasn’t so long ago – some kind of title challenge, has now become a cliffhanger. We have jeopardy here.
Liverpool’s victory over Brentford on Saturday means we have a classic two-horse run-off to the line. And really, this could go any way from here after a limp, muddled and generally uncomfortable 1-0 defeat at the London Stadium, during which relegation-haunted West Ham looked by far the more peppy and coherent team.
West Ham are also, lest we forget, trying to win a European trophy in the middle of their own relegation almost-battle. Thursday brings the first leg of their semi-final in the Europa Conference League against AZ Alkmaar, which despite sounding almost exactly like what a simulation of a computer-generated football club would be doing, is apparently real.
A single season of the Conference League takes one week shy of a year to complete. This thing is vast, massive, tectonic in scale, a footballing ziggurat. It’s beyond human ken, sun-like. Never ever look directly at the Europa Conference League 2022-23.
But West Ham were sprightly, lively and fun here. In Declan Rice, they had the best player on the pitch.
It even seemed fitting that the goal, West Ham’s winner, should have an air of pantomime about it. This was a strange moment. Saïd Benrahma did well to take the ball away from Luke Shaw near the centre-circle, but he had three players around him. This felt like someone lifting the pressure, moving his team up the pitch, just doing something for a bit.
He shot early, a sidefoot plink, rather than an actual shot. Faced with this pea-rolling thing David de Gea just kind of collapsed, falling backward, flailing with his hands and waving it on past him and into the net. If you didn’t know better you might think this was a deliberate miss, the charity penalty kick ushered into the net.
De Gea is one of the world’s best goalkeepers. He’s 32 years old now, with 540 games behind him. Why do things like this happen? It seemed at the time he was a little flustered, rushing back into his goal from an unusually advanced position. And perhaps it was a mistake that came from discomfort at being asked to play like this, to be a sweeper, to make up the game from the back.
It seemed an odd tactic for United with this back five, one that West Ham pressed at all afternoon. When life gives you Aaron Wan-Bissaka, maybe just make Aaron Wan-Bissaka-ade.
And there will be questions for Erik ten Hag now. Certainly, about the role and continued use of Wout Weghorst, who started here, but doing what exactly? What role was this? Gangling regista? Roving beanpole enforcer? False central midfield obstacle? He wandered, he jangled about, he stuck a telescopic leg in.
It is impossible not to admire Weghorst’s resourcefulness, his ability to adapt, to be useful and awkward. But it is kind of Manchester United around here. Not really Mark Hughes, is it?
Weghorst is a Total Footballer. He’s a total kind-of footballer. He totally does almost everything.
He was everywhere in the opening 10 minutes, doing everything almost quite well. Is there nothing this man can’t sort-of do? For a while the West Ham players kept passing the ball to him, a little startled to find him hanging around in such odd areas, doing everything, just none of it that well.
By the time he came off on 57 minutes seeing Weghorst involve himself, gamely, in every aspect of play was like watching someone make a lot of noise making a cup of tea, except after 10 minutes of crashing around you look up and they’re balancing on top of a cupboard, sieving a bowl of raspberries into a saucepan and spilling noodles all over the floor, and doing it all quite well, but it’s just, well, not really, what we were, oh never mind, carry on.
Manchester United pushed hard and gave everything, just in a muddled kind of way. West Ham could easily have had another goal. They will now surely stay up, as seemed likely.
But this is now getting uncomfortably close for Manchester United, who have stumbled, have lost gas and pep and kinetic energy as the season has narrowed to its end point. Defeat here means they need three more wins from their last four Premier League games to be totally sure of making it into the Champions League next season.
Liverpool have Leicester City away, Aston Villa at home and Southampton away. It is reasonable to assume they might win all of those.
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United have Wolves at home, Bournemouth away, then Chelsea and Fulham at home, none of which, apart from – let’s face it – Wolves, looks very easy right now. They need a maximum of nine points from that to be certain.
It really should be a canter. It won’t be. United have begun to fade, to lose leads, to run out of juice. There has been a brittleness ever since the League Cup win in February against Newcastle, with eight goals in their past 10 league games now. The endgame will be vital, not just to next season’s programme, but to the entire sense of momentum and ground gained under Ten Hag, the question of whether this thing is actually real.
