That was a pretty miserable day from start to finish. The weather was so shit the match was under threat and we didn’t find out until midday that it was going ahead. By the time the full time whistle went I wished it hadn’t.
It was a wet, cold and frustrating walk back to the car and then I had to sit for an hour in traffic trying to get out of the car park, stewing in my own thoughts.
The performance wasn’t anywhere near good enough, the atmosphere wasn’t anywhere near good enough and in the end I was relieved that we hadn’t lost. How the fuck did we get there? This is the worst United side in living memory, we’re absolutely flying and this should have been a home banker.
I don’t even say that in an arrogant, naive, tempting fate way. I know it’s them and that means it’s generally not easy. I wasn’t one of those saying it would be a walkover and an easy win. I didn’t think it would be easy, not like West Ham last week for example. I thought it would be professional, dominant, fairly straightforward win by a smallish margin. 2-0 or 3-1, with the killer goal coming fairly late.
I’ve watched a fair bit of United lately and they’ve been awful. Genuinely terrible. Poor individually, poor collectively and looking completely ill at ease with the formation their new manager wants to play. Lack of effort hasn’t been their problem. A lack of quality and balance has been. Square pegs in round holes all over the park. Even if they somehow got it together and raised their game, they’d need us to drop off massively for them to have a chance
And that’s what happened. They looked a different side, and so did we. And yet, statistically this looks like a game we should have won. Our XG was higher in this than in the 7-0! It didn’t feel like that watching it, but I may be allowing my judgement to be clouded by the emotion of watching the game in the stadium. How it felt is not necessarily how it was, and maybe if I’d watched on TV or if this was a game involving teams I have no emotional investment in, I’d see it differently.
I can only say how I feel about it, but I am aware I might be overstating things because of how it felt watching it. I never felt like we built up a head of steam, it felt like the chances we had came sparingly and the longer the game went the more threatening United were, as they grew in confidence.
They actually looked surprisingly confident even early on, but we contributed to that with the cagey start we made. We didn’t go after them and we didn’t get the crowd going early. A fast start would have done that, but it was almost like we wanted to feel them out to see what they were doing before committing ourselves fully.
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