SERVICE!
With the possible exception of overtaking Roy Keane and gleefully unfurling your middle finger a split-second before realising it’s him, nothing in football tests nerve and moral fibre quite like a tough away fixture. Manchester United’s results against the top nine in the Premier League this season make for a grisly character reference: 0-4, 3-6, 1-3, 2-3, 0-7, 0-2. (Yes, sure, they won 2-1 away to 10th-placed Fulham, but that’s got nothing to do with the narrative we’re peddling here.) Six games, six defeats, 25 goals conceded and a general acceptance that United can’t handle football’s hotter kitchens. On Thursday night in Seville, they gave the most emphatic response to such slurs by folding just as miserably against the 13th-best team in Spain!
Sevilla’s 3-0 win in the Big Vase quarter-final second leg completed an extraordinary, almost unfathomable comeback from the first hour of the first game at Old Trafford, when they were lucky to be only 2-0 down. It ended United’s chances of doing a cup treble in Erik ten Hag’s first season. And it reminded everyone that, for all his good work, he still has an almighty mess to clean up. In the grand scheme United have still had an excellent campaign, but the ease and frequency with which they have been dismantled away from home is, depending on your perspective, genuinely alarming, utterly hilarious or both. “It’s unacceptable,” fumed Ten Hag. “We lost the battles, they had more passion, more desire, more willingness … Everyone can see the demands and standard has to be higher in a club like Manchester United.”
Their performance was so bereft that, at one stage, Football Daily convinced itself there was only one credible explanation: with Manchester City in mind, Ten Hag implored his players to stop the treble from happening if it’s the last thing they do at United, and one or 11 of them had got the wrong end of the stick. After the game, Ten Hag declined the invitation to throw individual players under the bus, defending David de Gea in particular. “He’s the one with the most clean sheets in the Premier League,” he cooed. “That shows he’s a very capable goalkeeper.” United have managed 24 clean sheets in all competitions this season, though that wasn’t much consolation after a defensive performance that was more analogous to Spud’s morning-after blankets in Trainspotting. The mind boggles at what Brighton’s relentless, high-pressing optimists might do in Sunday’s FA Cup semi-final.
It’s easy to blame De Gea and Harry Maguire, and it’s true that Thursday night’s first goal was a Michelin star dish for connoisseurs of tragicomedy and schadenfreude, but the problems go deeper. There are, broadly, two ways of looking at United’s performance. The first is that the whole squad is shattered, mentally and physically, after a uniquely demanding season; the second is that Ten Hag needs to bundle almost all of them through the door marked DO ONE without sentiment or dignity. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Ten Hag’s biggest job this summer is to sort the sense from the hysteria, the future from the past and the wheat from the chaff – and then find a home for all the players he doesn’t want. The last part will be the hardest.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Until I have the words to express my feelings properly I will struggle to verbalise them. The noise around the situation is loud and I need some quiet to let it all sink in. Unfortunately the World Cup and [Big Cup] dream is over for me and everyone will think that’s the main focus, but it’s the day-to-day of what I’m about to go through that is the most draining of my thoughts” – Arsenal and England captain Leah Williamson confirms the brutal blow that she’ll be sidelined for the long term by – unfortunately, you guessed it – a ruptured ACL.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Corsham Town, of the Hellenic Premier League, have been forced to play nine games in 21 days to complete their fixtures. An amazing FA Vase run to the semi-final has meant an impossible end-of-season promotion push: three games a week in the last three weeks, with the last five games in nine days. Why not an extension to the season? It’s happened before. Has anyone else got similar stories?” – Mike Smith [we’ll point you the way of Sandhurst Town – Football Daily Ed].
As a West Ham supporter, I hope Chelsea’s radical strategy of appointing whoever was in charge four gaffers ago doesn’t catch on” – Steve Butler.
Just catching up on Wednesday’s Football Daily (full email edition) and the piece about UCLA developing a robot that can kick a ball while withstanding shoves. If they want to develop a modern footballer robot, surely it should collapse in a heap on the floor at the merest brush of a feather?” – Brendan Mackinney.
Nice to see a picture of Neil Pointon in the Memory Lane section of yesterday’s Football Daily (full email edition). A few years ago, I had to do a talk at work about some excruciatingly dull aspect of law. I decided to engage the audience by throwing in an early zinger, and my first slide featured a photo of ‘Dissa’ next to one of Paul Power, teeing up the, ahem, hilarious intro: ‘My presentation is all about Everton left-backs of the 1980s. It’s a Power-Pointon presentation.’ Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They didn’t deserve me” – Andy Korman.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Andy Korman.
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