You only had to look at the teamsheets an hour before kickoff to feel that Manchester United could be in for a difficult afternoon against Manchester City. Harry Maguire and Jonny Evans in central defence against Erling Haaland? Victor Lindelof at left-back? This didn’t look promising.
And yet in the end, it was still a surprise just how bad it turned out to be.
United have been falling further behind City more or less continuously since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, but despite the widening gap in quality, they have still at least often managed to give them a game.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer always had the weaker team going into his derbies, yet still he somehow won four out of nine – in fact, only Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp have more victories against Pep Guardiola. For all his faults as a manager, Solskjaer often succeeded in sending out teams that played with enough energy and ruthlessness to take the result against the odds.
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There was none of that fire from United yesterday in a match that mostly resembled an attack v defence training exercise. The only moment in a grim second half when the home fans were at full cry was when they booed the substitution of Rasmus Højlund, just as they had done when he was taken off in the defeat to Brighton last month.
Just as he had after the Brighton game, Ten Hag explained that Højlund is young and not yet used to the physical demands of playing every minute of every game at this level. The crowd know this too, but their reaction in that moment revealed a growing frustration with a coach whose decisions have come to seem increasingly confused.
If United’s supporters were feeling peeved about the result, they will not have felt any better having listened to the analysis of their coach. Ten Hag did not even complain about the silly penalty with which City took the lead. “No comment, make your point of view,” he told journalists afterwards. You imagine Alex Ferguson would have had a comment had a VAR official who had recently been on a guest refereeing jaunt to the United Arab Emirates giving such a penalty against his team.
(Not that Ferguson could have honestly claimed that he had never seen such a ridiculous decision. Seasoned Manchester derby watchers might remember the FA Cup fifth-round tie between these sides in March 1996, when Alan Wilkie – the referee who had sent Eric Cantona off at Crystal Palace the night he kicked the fan – gave an apparently random penalty to United for Michael Frontzeck’s “foul” on Cantona at a corner. United equalised from the spot and, thanks in part to this generous decision, went on to win the Cup and the Double. “Jockeying for position at a corner is part-and-parcel of the game,” protested the then-City manager, Alan Ball. “Would he have given it at the other end? I very much doubt it.” It would gladden Ball’s heart to see how times have changed.)
When the teamsheet revealed that Raphael Varane would start on the bench, the general assumption was that he had failed to fully recover from the exertions of last Tuesday’s Champions League game against Copenhagen. Not so according to Ten Hag, who revealed with a smile before the game that he had chosen the Evans-Maguire central defensive partnership for tactical reasons.
The tactical reason turned out to be that when Varane plays, Maguire has to play as the left-sided centre back and this, in Ten Hag’s view, was a risk against Manchester City’s high press. He prefers the right-footed Maguire on the right side of the central defensive partnership.
The reasoning, especially in the context of a 3-0 defeat, seemed pedantic and abstruse. The obvious question hanging over everything was: why not just play Varane, who is United’s most accomplished defender, in his usual position as the right-sided central back? It’s only two months since ten Hag was trying to bundle Maguire out the door to West Ham and now he’s keeping Varane out of the team?
There was a similar awkward situation in midfield, where Scott McTominay, whom Ten Hag tried to sell in the summer and who has until recently been a quietly seething figure on the bench, was picked in the attacking midfield role ahead of Mason Mount, the marquee midfield signing of the summer.
It’s not that McTominay doesn’t deserve to play ahead of Mount – based on recent performances, he clearly does. It’s more that nobody can understand why Ten Hag chose to spend so much money on Mount, who, on his best day, is an inferior version of Bruno Fernandes. Mount was supposed to be a multifunctional option in midfield but so far all that has meant is that he has performed equally badly in every position he has been asked to play.
Amazingly, Ten Hag argued that United had played very well in the first half, that the game was “toe to toe”, that “the chances were similar”. In the game everyone else was watching, United’s two best chances were created by City mistakes – the first by Josko Gvardiol, the second by Phil Foden – City monopolised the ball and ranged at will around United’s penalty area, with Erling Haaland missing two huge chances either side of his goal from the penalty spot.
If United had played so well in the first half, why had Ten Hag replaced Sofyan Amrabat with Mason Mount at half-time? Ten Hag’s explanation was that since United were losing by that point, he had decided he needed more “offensive power”. But the change had pretty much the opposite effect, as United instead lost any semblance of compactness in midfield and allowed City to control the game at will. The only chance they created in the second half was when Christian Eriksen picked out Marcus Rashford’s run into the box with a pass from the halfway line.
United’s misery was summed up in two moments: the exhausted passivity with which the team watched Rodri gradually become aware that they were going to leave him space for the shot that led to City’s third goal, and then the petulance of Antony, Ten Hag’s most expensive and worst signing, who should have been red-carded for a wild hack on Jeremy Doku. Jadon Sancho, if he was bothering to watch, presumably allowed himself a smirk.
