There are many reasons to enjoy the Manchester derby, but one of the more childish is the knowledge that Manchester city play their home games at a stadium whose name (Etihad), translated from Arabic, means something along the lines of ‘union’ or ‘unity’. United, in other words. Manchester City play at the United Stadium. It’s the sort of thing you suspect somebody might have checked before they put the fucking sign up.
Anyway, across town at the actual United, there wasn’t a great deal of unity to go around yesterday. A couple of hours before kick-off, around 2,000 supporters were marching down Sir Matt Busby Way in protest at the people running the club. Inside the ground, the TRA had withdrawn its customary pre-match flag display. Instead, hanging above the players’ tunnel was a single banner: THE WAY YOU TREAT US IS A DISGRACE.
On the pitch, meanwhile, United were about to spend more than an hour playing against ten men and somehow become less coherent the longer the numerical advantage lasted. And sitting above it all were representatives of the ownership which has brought us to this strange place: Avram Glazer in the directors’ box and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whose arrival at the ground I witnessed first-hand.
If nothing else, it gave you plenty of time to ponder what the word ‘United’ is actually supposed to mean.
Decidedly Un-United
The protest march, organised by the 1958, set off at 3pm from the Bishop Blaize and made its way down Sir Matt Busby Way towards the ground. There must have been around 2,000 people there, probably more. There were flares. Smoke bombs. Sweat. It was, for once, not raining at Old Trafford. There were chants about the Glazers, chants about City and chants about cheating.
The march continued beneath the Munich Tunnel before finishing outside the players’ entrance by the Stretford End. That was where I peeled off to walk round to my entrance. And where the timing became almost perfect. Just as I got round there, a souped-up black BMW was being chauffeur-driven directly through an area in which cars are supposedly forbidden on matchdays. And I mean directly up to the door. One rule for the rich, eh?
Out unfolded Sir Jim Ratcliffe, looking like a slightly sheepish, scruffy stork. You genuinely couldn’t have timed the protest much better had somebody arranged for Ratcliffe to arrive at precisely that moment. I’d spent much of the previous hour taking photographs of the march, but demonstrated my true journalist’s instincts by completely failing to have my phone ready when one of the owners of Manchester United suddenly climbed out of a car about ten yards away from me.
I did manage to shout something at him, though: ‘You scruffy get.’ Woodward and Bernstein would have been proud.
The symbolism was difficult to miss. Supporters were outside protesting at how their club was being run while one owner was chauffeur-driven virtually to the turnstile and another, Avram Glazer, was sitting in the directors’ box.
The timing was particularly good because United Women had just lost 5-0. Ratcliffe’s attitude towards the women’s team has been a disgrace. They sold their best player over the summer and the team has suffered indignity after indignity. The Glazers hardly have a glorious record on this front either, having disbanded the women’s team early in their ‘stewardship’ of the club.
Different owners. Same Manchester United ability to make you wonder whether anybody in charge actually understands what they’re in charge of. Inside, the unrest continued. The TRA refused to take part in its now-customary pre-match flag-waving display in the Stretford End, effectively withdrawing its support. Instead there was that solitary banner above the players’ tunnel:
THE WAY YOU TREAT US IS A DISGRACE.
That referred specifically to the latest clusterfuck in the relationship between United and their own supporters: hundreds of loyal fans caught up in the club’s anti-touting crackdown and effectively being asked to demonstrate their innocence or risk losing their season tickets.
But you didn’t need to know the minutiae of that particular row to understand the sentiment on the banner. Plenty of United supporters have felt disgracefully treated by the people running their football club for a very long time.
A Tale of Two Ownerships
And this, really, is the Manchester derby we’ve been watching for the past couple of decades. There’s no point pretending United haven’t spent money. We have. Fucking loads of it, frequently very badly. That isn’t the argument.
The argument is about what the two ownership models have done to the clubs they steward. The Glazers bought Manchester United in 2005 through a leveraged takeover which loaded around £660million of debt onto a football club which hadn’t needed it before they arrived. More than two decades later, United are still paying interest on debt associated with that takeover.
One of the richest, best-supported and most commercially successful football clubs on the planet has spent 21 years helping to pay for the privilege of having the Glazers own it.
Across Manchester, city’s ownership has operated in almost precisely the opposite way. Since Sheikhing Stevens Mansour arrived, vast sums have gone into the football club and its surroundings: players, academy, training facilities, stadium development and the wider Etihad ‘Campus’. City say more than £700million of private-sector investment has gone into East Manchester through city Football Group and its partners since the move to the stadium. Hey, they even ALLEGEDLY help other clubs pay the exorbitant transfer fees of players exiting the club. Not my words, just something I heard during the march yesterday. I’m just saying what I heard, with all the required caveats (nothing to see here, move along).
Annnnyyyyywayyyyy, where does that leave us? One ownership model arrived at its football club and gave it a leg-up. The other arrived and hamstrung its own.
That doesn’t explain every bad United signing, every managerial disaster or why we apparently lose the ability to cross a football when the opposition goes down to ten men. United have generated and squandered enough of their own money to populate several excellent teams. But ownership creates the conditions in which football decisions are made. City spent the modern era building an infrastructure designed to help the football club succeed. United spent much of it servicing an ownership structure designed to help the owners own Manchester United.
And that is why the protests outside Old Trafford shouldn’t be treated as something separate from the football taking place inside it. They’re part of the same story.
And then there was a Football Match
All of which rather threatened to overshadow the fact that there was a derby to play. And, for once, there were reasonable grounds for optimism. Whatever else you might say about the start to this season, Old Trafford has become something approaching a fortress under Michael Carrick. United had won nine of their previous ten Premier League games there, scoring 26 goals and averaging 2.7 points per game — the best home record in the division over that period.
There was, admittedly, one rather ugly stain on that record: Leeds. And now there are two. Losing at home to city is bad enough. Losing at home to Leeds is bad enough. Somehow, amid all those excellent results, United have contrived to surrender the bragging rights in the two games in which we really wanted them.
And this one was particularly galling because city spent most of the match with ten men. Foden’s red card should have changed everything. Instead, increasingly, it seemed to twist our collective melons, man. Rather than stretching city, keeping the ball and making ten men fahkin run ahbaat, United lost their composure. The crossing became woeful. We started shooting from everywhere. Most of those efforts finished high, wide and not particularly handsome, although Kobbie Fucking Mainoo bucked the trend with a tremendous effort against the inside of the post.
Too often somebody attempted the complicated ball when the simple one would have forced city to move again. It had uncomfortable echoes of Everton at home and Newcastle away last season: ten men retreating into a low block and United apparently becoming less certain what to do because we had an extra player.
There was still a chance to rescue it. In amongst all the chaos Bruno produced one moment of beautiful calm, sliding Mbeumo through during the laughably short period of injury time. He should have scored, but didn’t.
And so city somehow escaped Old Trafford with three points from a game in which they played with ten men for more than an hour, scored a goal which should not have stood and spent much of the closing stages simply wasting time. Kind of like me when I used to take smoke breaks at work even after I gave up smoking.
Which brings us, unfortunately, to flaming Michael Oliver.
Observations
Oliver, Oliver, never before has a boy wanted more …
To the layperson, it might seem slightly odd for a supporter of the team whose opponents went down to ten men so early to spend much of his match report whinging about the referee. But this is Michael Oliver we’re talking about. Yet again, Oliver twisted it to make himself one of the main characters somehow. City appeared to get free-kicks every time somebody fell over. Oliver himself got in the way of the ball so often that it was a wonder he didn’t eventually attempt a sliding tackle.
And then there was Donnarumma: the Italian wasted time at every conceivable opportunity. Every goal-kick became a small administrative procedure. Every dead ball required a period of quiet reflection. He should have been booked far earlier than he was, and once it became obvious what he was doing, a referee with any fucking agency at all might have done something about it. Instead, Oliver largely let him get on with it, the obsequious little shit.
And then, after all that — the sending-off, substitutions, injuries, VAR interventions and Donnarumma apparently operating in a different time zone from the rest of us — we got five minutes of added time. Five. The VAR check for city’s ‘goal’ took about four minutes fifty seconds.
Donnarumma, incidentally, comes from Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples. I went there last summer and there was anti-Donnarumma graffiti on the walls. Imagine being such a knobhead that even your home town has started leaving reviews.
I hope they build a statue of Michael Oliver in his home town and that pigeons shit all over it.
The Red
From what I’ve seen and heard since, there seems to be fairly widespread agreement that Foden deserved to go. The only real argument appears to be whether Bruno should have gone as well. Obviously he shouldn’t have. Naturally, one of the dissenting voices was Roy Keane.
Keano is my second-favourite United player of all time. I adored him as a footballer. But, Christ, he’s becoming hard work as a pundit. Increasingly, it feels as though every United incident has to become another opportunity for Royston to grind whatever anti-United axe he’s brought into the studio that afternoon.
Give it a rest, Roy.
VAR, VAR, VAR
One of my correspondents — my Mum — was watching on Sky and messaged during the game to report that Gary Neville, on co-commentary, had admitted he didn’t understand the modern offside law. Good. That makes two of us. Actually, after watching Match of the Day, I’m not entirely convinced anybody understands it.
Haaland himself, apparently, was onside. Dorgu’s outstretched foot saw to that. The problem was Fernández, standing in an offside position and very obviously attempting to play the cross before Haaland scored behind him. Martínez reacted to Fernández because, oddly enough, defenders tend to react to opposition players attempting to head footballs in their own penalty area. VAR decided this didn’t constitute interference.
And then came the best bit: after the game, Pro Ref admitted they’d got it wrong. An ‘error of judgement’, apparently. VAR should have sent Oliver to the monitor. Cheers, lads.
What exactly is the exchange rate on refereeing apologies these days? Can we swap three of them for a Premier League point? Do we get to replay the game? Do city have two points removed? Does somebody pop round Carrington on Monday morning with a Sorry You Wuz Robbed card and a box of Milk Tray (because the lady loves them)? Nope: city get three points. United get fuck all.
Incredibly predictably Luke Shaw was Injured
By some miracle — possibly because United had virtually no other fixtures — Luke Shaw started every Premier League game last season and the first three of this one. This was clearly unsustainable. From approximately the moment United decided not to sign Lewis Hall, it seemed inevitable that Shaw would get injured. And so it came to pass: this wasn’t an (Oliver) plot twist.
Which meant Patrick Dorgu started at left-back for only the second time in his career. I like Dorgu. I really do. But I still don’t know what he is. Carrick seemed to decide last season that he was a left-winger. That made a certain amount of sense. Ballon d’Orgu has the clichéd ‘great engine’ and is much less dangerous to United when his occasional positional wanderings take place 70 yards from our own goal.
At left-back those wanderings become rather more alarming. He has a tendency to drift out of position and then, upon realising where he is, headless-chicken it back towards the ball at tremendous speed. He had a shaky afternoon here and played his part in the build-up to city’s ‘goal’.
So what do we profile him as now? Left-back? Wing-back? Winger? Emergency auxiliary chaos merchant? I like the lad. I just haven’t got a fucking clue what he is.
city were Shit Too
And here’s the really annoying bit: city weren’t even particularly good. As a mate of mine put it afterwards: ‘I don’t mind if we’re played off the park and lose or it’s an unlucky goal etc, but when we’re shit and they win by timewasting and an offside goal it boils my piss.’
Quite. There have been derbies in the recent past where city have Rolls-Royced their way through United. You know the ones: Guardiola standing there looking unbearably pleased with himself, chewing his own spit like a weirdo while city keep the ball for approximately three weeks and United chase shadows.
This wasn’t one of them. City misplaced passes. They put the ball out of play all the time. They went down to ten men. Then they scored their dodgy goal and spent the closing stages strangling the life out of the match through every available piece of shithousery.
And, painful though it is to admit it, fair fucking play to them. Because that is exactly what United should have done against Everton last week. Remember Cunha at Anfield? Keep the ball. Win a foul. Take it into the corner. Make somebody kick you. Waste thirty seconds. Repeat. Sometimes winning football matches isn’t about being brilliant. Sometimes it’s about recognising what the game requires and doing it: city did, United didn’t. Which might be the most irritating observation of the lot.
United?
So where does that leave us? Four points from four games is shit. Losing at home to city is especially shit. Failing to beat ten men is shit, regardless of how badly Michael Oliver refereed the game or how badly VAR fucked up city’s goal.
Carrick and his players have to own that. But the football doesn’t exist in isolation. Sunday began with thousands of supporters marching towards Old Trafford because of the way they believe OUR football club is being run. It continued with Jim Ratcliffe being driven past them virtually to the front door and Avram Glazer taking his seat in the directors’ box. Inside the ground, supporters withdrew their flags and replaced them with a message telling the club its treatment of them was a disgrace.
Then the team came out and lost a derby to ten men. Perhaps that is why the stupid Etihad joke stuck with me. Because United is supposed to mean more than the name on the badge. It ought to mean a football club pulling in broadly the same direction: owners, institution, team, supporters. Manchester United haven’t felt like that for a very long time.
Across town, they can keep the United Stadium, I’d just quite like the United football club back.
By Andrew Kirby