Thirty-two years ago today, a 19-year-old Paul Scholes made his Manchester United debut. It was the League Cup, away at Port Vale, and United went behind early. Then Scholes scored twice and they won 2-1. There was hope in that team. Promise. A sense of something coming. A gang of young lads emerging together, so young that we sang: “They go to school in the morning and Choccy is their teacher”.
Thirty-two years later, again against a team in white, it is difficult to work out where Manchester United go from here. A mate described the football at the Cottage as “turgid”. Craven would work too. Lethargic. Aimless. Gary Neville went in two-footed and called one spell the worst he’d seen from United in 15 years, which seemed a bit much. It wasn’t even the worst performance I’d seen this week. Brighton was considerably more embarrassing.
Still, that we’re debating which Manchester United performance of the past seven days was the more abject probably tells its own story. The first half was at least ridiculously open. Chances everywhere. Lammens channelled his inner David de Gea, although he possibly took the tribute too far when he tried to save Calvin Bassey’s shot with his legs.
What happened next was bloody ridiculous: Lisandro Martínez, presumably deciding that conceding goals through conventional defensive incompetence had become passé, contrived to turn the rebound into his own net. There have been so many goals stemming from defensive calamities this season that the entire back line now appears to be auditioning for a revival of Danny Baker’s Own Goals and Gaffes videos.
Then came more nothing. There remains a giant Cunha-shaped elephant in the room too. Can we stop pretending he’s a number nine now? As another mate put it, playing a false nine is “woke modern football nonsense — like short corners and players cutting holes in their socks.” He did at least rescue us. His late shot took the sort of deflection United’s performance scarcely deserved and somehow we escaped London with a point.
But perhaps the most telling moment came after the football had finished: Youri Tielemans apparently told the travelling United supporters to shut up. Think about that for a minute: a new Manchester United player telling Manchester United supporters — people who had travelled to London on a Sunday afternoon to watch that — to shut up.
There was at least a rather better attempt at supporter relations from Carlos Baleba. He hasn’t actually played for United yet, but was down at Craven Cottage and afterwards gave his shirt to a supporter in the away end.
“That’s a good one,” Peter Bolton, who’s followed the Reds across 44 countries and something like 5000 games, told me afterwards. “He’s not even played and he’s giving away his shirt.”
Before adding: “Jim Ratcliffe will probably charge him for that.”
Quite. Somewhere in Monaco, scruffy Big Bird Jim Dingle’s stork-like ears presumably pricked up at the possibility of another revenue stream. Match-worn shirts: £85. Match-unworn shirts: £110.
There it was again: the un-Unitedness of Manchester United. Players over here. Supporters over there. Executives somewhere else entirely. A manager trying to make sense of the bits in between. And nobody seemingly able to articulate what Manchester United is supposed to be becoming.
Contrast that with the picture United themselves posted from Craven Cottage: the Reds on the road, flags hanging from the away end, supporters still carrying this club around the country despite everything. One of those flags read NIELD REDS. You’ll be hearing more about that flag later this week.
I’m launching a new series called United People, looking beyond results and league tables at the wider Manchester United community — and at what the word United actually means to the people who really matter. The people who follow the club from Rome to Mandalay. The people who carry its stories, rituals and memories from one generation to the next.
The first piece is about Jon Nield and his son Alex, their quest to visit all 92 league grounds together, and what following United has come to mean to them. Later in the series I’ll also be talking to the aforementioned Peter Bolton, one of the great matchgoing Reds, a man who has barely missed a United game in half a century.
Now comes the international break. Rashford and Mainoo have already pulled out of the England squad. I won’t cry off: there’ll be plenty here over the next couple of weeks, beginning with those first United People stories. Which might be just as well because if you’re looking for something recognisably United at the moment, you’re probably better off looking in the away end.
By Andrew Kirby, Sports Storytelling & Communications | Andrew Kirby
The post Fulham 1-1 Manchester United: Looking for United in all the wrong places first appeared on Republik Of Mancunia: A Manchester United Blog.
