My grandad had a catchphrase: “Is everyone alright?” He asked it all the time.
What he wanted wasn’t really information. He wanted reassurance about his family: his daughter, the grandkids, the great grandkids. He wanted to know nobody was arguing, nobody was fighting, nobody was in trouble, nobody was ill or injured. Everyone was all right. Everyone was exactly where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Good. He could get back to the Mirror crossword.
I increasingly think this is all I want from Manchester United. Is everyone all right? Are they where they’re supposed to be, doing what they’re supposed to be doing? For much of the second half of last season, the answer was: actually, yes. That might have been the best thing about Michael Carrick’s arrival, beyond finishing third and beating Liverpool, City, Arsenal and Chelsea. Everything calmed down. There weren’t ridiculous stories coming out of United every day. There wasn’t a controversy every five minutes. The online chelping subsided. You didn’t wake up each morning wondering what fresh idiocy was about to befall us.
You could get on with your day.
I liked that. I liked it so much that I spent much of the summer worrying about when it would end. Because United seem to have developed a rhythm. We have a decent season, convince ourselves the corner has finally been turned, rest briefly upon our laurels – then discover the laurels are actually attached to a trapdoor and plunge straight back into another crisis.
And I worry we’re beginning to hear the hinges creaking. Wednesday night’s 3-2 Carabao Cup defeat against Brighton wasn’t a crisis by itself but it felt worryingly like the sort of game that precedes one. Two-nil up inside ten minutes – Shea Lacey scoring a wonderful first senior goal. Mason Mount adding another – and Old Trafford was buoyant. For about 20 minutes, just as against City on Sunday, United looked quite good.
Then we seemed to sack it off again. Brighton dominated from around the quarter-hour mark, scored just before half-time, equalised midway through the second half and then went ahead four minutes later. Two-nil up to three-two down. Snakes and fucking ladders football.
United hadn’t lost at Old Trafford after being two goals ahead for 50 years, hadn’t lost after leading at the interval since 1984. I only became aware of that Orwellian statistic recently and I’m not particularly interested in it. These records are designed to fall eventually. It was the same with that great unbeaten European home record we once possessed: unless civilisation ends first, somebody – Big Brother – eventually beats you.
What bothers me much more is the eye test: United didn’t look good enough, strong enough or quick enough against Brighton, and that bit feels horribly familiar.
Is everyone alright?
The last few days have had that unmistakable post-Fergie United smell about them. There’s the JJ Gabriel business. The noise around the City game. The protests – justified, and largely brought about by the club’s own behaviour – generating more headlines. And now this. Humans apparently share about 98 per cent of their DNA with pigs. We share around 60 per cent with bananas and a surprising amount with slugs. Which brings me naturally to the Glazers and Big Bird scruffy stork-a-like Sir Jim Ratcliffe. What percentage of the anxiety experienced by Manchester United supporters can be traced back to the people running the club? I reckon it’s comfortably higher than the pig number.
This endless boom-and-bust cycle isn’t simply something that happens to United. It is a symptom of the way United have been run. Every time it seems the football side might finally have acquired some stability, something happens to drag the circus back into town. And, Christ, it gets tiring.
As one of my mates put it after Brighton: “It’s the same every fucking summer. We start poorly and then it’s just shit.” He reckoned he’d like to see us start brilliantly and then become shit, just for variety.
Less football. Result!
There is, of course, one positive: we’ve got fewer fixtures now. Result. Had United beaten Brighton, we’d have likely had Manchester City in the next round, at the United Stadium – what the Etihad means, fact fans – and I’m not entirely convinced another Manchester derby is what my nervous system needs at the moment. Or Carrick’s.
Unfortunately, the Carabao Cup mattered. Carrick probably needs to demonstrate tangible progress this season, and a cup run would have provided it. United fell at the first hurdle in both domestic knockout competitions last season, before Carrick’s spell as caretaker. More was expected this time.
Now one route has disappeared immediately. We’re already playing catch-up in the Premier League. Standards-wise, we look some distance from the serious Champions League contenders. So realistically, that leaves the FA Cup. That’s where we’re at. In September.
Shea Lacey and the Moody Teenager
One of the great shames of Wednesday is that we should be talking about Shea Lacey. Nineteen years old. First senior start. Eight minutes gone. Bang. Instead, much of the week’s United conversation has concerned another teenager, JJ Gabriel, for rather moodier reasons. Lacey deserved his night. Unfortunately, what followed rather spoiled it.
Our supposed midfield rebuild didn’t stop Brighton playing through us with worrying ease. Youri Tielemans, captain for the night, looked at times as though he’d borrowed Casemiro’s pace to go with the similarly cherubic cheeks. A friend desperately wants Tielemans to succeed. So do I. Unfortunately, as he observed afterwards, Tielemans isn’t Casemiro. No blockbuster headers in the locker, stored up for just when we need them.
Yoro and Heaven looked all over the shop.
I have high hopes for Sesko, but on Wednesday he appeared at times to have forgotten both how to trap a football and how human balance works. My dad offered the inevitable comparison: Wout Weghorst.
And then there’s Diogo Dalot. That same friend informed me he has now “done a 180” on Dalot. He used to consider him a perfectly decent, industrious player. Now he sees a full-back who can’t cross particularly well, gets into promising shooting positions without scoring (unless you count blazing one into the second tier as a goal) and, against Brighton, responded to everyone else attempting to play through the press by lumping the ball downfield. Possession lost. Brighton attack. United stretched. Goal. One mistake compounding another.
There was at least some pleasing nominative symmetry in having Darlow and Dalot on the pitch simultaneously. Both were terrible. All we needed was Diallo to complete the set. Although, to be fair, we could actually have done with him.
Three-goal head start?
The bit that worries me most is the pattern. Against City on Sunday, United began well. Against Brighton, United began well but added the goals: two inside ten minutes. And then… What? Brighton had 18 shots to United’s nine. After Mount scored in the tenth minute, United didn’t manage another shot on target until the 76th. That isn’t a freak result, that’s a team losing control of a football match.
Which brings us to Fulham. What are they going to offer us on Sunday? A three-goal head start? Nine men? Perhaps Álvaro Arbeloa – and, yes, what an enormously comforting time to be facing a team managed by a former Liverpool player – could allow us to start at 4-0, remove Bernd Leno and ask one of his centre-halves to play the first half dressed as Big Bird, in a nod to scruffy Jim.
Even so, I’m still not entirely confident we’d secure all three points.
The boos
United were roundly booed off at full-time. I’ve never liked booing your own team. For most of my life it felt profoundly un-United and verboten. But then we entered what might politely be called the Banter Years, and I’ve heard it with increasing frequency at Old Trafford. That matters. Not because supporters are always right. We’re demonstrably not. Spend five minutes on social media after United lose and you’ll find people demanding the manager be sacked, half the team sold and probably Fred brought back.
It matters because the boos are another symptom: frustration, exhaustion, the sense of having been here before. Again and again and again. Rinse and repeat. Brighton have become particularly adept at inducing it.The previous time they visited Old Trafford in a domestic cup competition was in January, with Darren Fletcher in temporary charge shortly before Carrick arrived. United lost that one too.
Shea Lacey was sent off that day, this time he scored. Different Shea Lacey story, same United ending.
Media blackout
And this is where my grandad comes back in with a skip in his slippers. Fulham on Sunday suddenly feels much bigger than a September league game ought to because lose that and then comes the international break. Something like 20 days with no Manchester United match to change the conversation. We all know what happens next:
UNITED IN CRISIS.
The badge with a crack running down the middle of it like they always do in the Mirror.
Every day, the same questions: Is Carrick under pressure? Have the players stopped responding?
Ten things wrong with Manchester United, Five candidates who could replace Carrick.
I genuinely think I might impose a football media and social-media blackout upon myself. For my mental health. Because this is the strange thing about supporting United now: I don’t particularly look forward to matches.
I did last season. Maybe that’s because there were fewer of them. Maybe because we were winning. Maybe I’m simply a fair-weather supporter. But I like fair weather. I like the sun. I don’t like wind and rain. I don’t like feeling miserable about a football club. I don’t like waking up wondering what ridiculous thing has happened now.
And I don’t want Carrick sacked. Quite the opposite. The most valuable thing he brought back to Manchester United last season wasn’t a formation or a tactical innovation. It was calm. Stability. For a few months, United stopped feeling like an institution permanently waiting for the next explosion.
Wednesday night was bad. The start to this season has been worrying. A cup has already gone. There are legitimate questions about the team, the recruitment, the performances and Carrick himself. But the answer cannot always be another revolution: United have had enough of those.
What I want is for the people above Carrick to give him the conditions in which the stability he created can survive a bad run. I want United to stop lurching from optimism to catastrophe and back again. I want to stop worrying about what’s coming next. I want my grandad’s question to have the most boring answer imaginable.
Is everyone all right?
Yeah. Everyone’s all right.
Now get on with the crossword.