MANCHESTER UNITED have swapped swagger for stagger. The former is what’s missing from Louis van Gaal’s side that we saw in previous United teams. It was personified in players such as George Best, Eric Cantona and Cristiano Ronaldo, but the current team do not play with the same panache and have staggered through the season so far.
Tomorrow night’s FA Cup quarter-final against Arsenal is an interesting game for both sides. Apart from determining which one will get through to the semi-finals, it could dictate what they do in the rest of the Premier League season. One of them is going to have to climb a mountain afterwards.
People are sharpening their knives for United. If they come unstuck at Old Trafford tomorrow, it’s another season without a trophy. Similarly, Arsenal look like they are going out of the Champions League. If they go out of the FA Cup as well, what reaction is Arsène Wenger going to get from his players? It will leave one of the sides badly damaged psychologically. That’s something both managers will be wary of.
Van Gaal will be thinking: “We’re winning, but not playing well.” Spectators are still waiting for United to cut loose, score goals and win with some style — this is a must for them. This match may finally persuade him to unveil his first-choice side, provided he has settled on one. We are now into March and I’m not sure he has.
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Injuries account for much of the chopping and changing, but you also get the impression that Van Gaal is trying to prove to people that his philosophy is correct. Wayne Rooney is a tried-and-tested 20-goals-a-season man up front, so let’s put him in midfield and then say we can’t challenge Chelsea and Manchester City because we don’t have a 20-goal striker.
If you have a striker scoring goals, as Diego Costa and Sergio Aguero do for Chelsea and Manchester City, everybody else in the team gets a lift from that. It’s all right saying that Rooney can play in a number of positions, but the most difficult thing in football is to score goals and then it’s about what those goals do for the rest of the players. They are not playing under as much pressure if someone is scoring regularly.
Angel di Maria has yet to justify his £59.7m fee, a record for a British club. People tell me he played his best football in his final year at Real Madrid not in the wide area but one in from that, but he was also playing with a different level of player at the Bernabeu than he is at Old Trafford.
Robin van Persie has reverted to the injury-interrupted seasons he used to have at Arsenal, where he missed more than a quarter of their league matches over his eight years there. And Radamel Falcao has suffered the one that every player hates and fears — cruciate ligament damage. Everybody comes back differently from it: some look like they have never had an operation while others find it difficult to get anywhere near where they were.
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The only excuse you can offer for the Colombia international is that he has not played 20 games back-to-back to see if he’s going to get up to speed and score goals in the Premier League on a regular basis. He has been in and out of the team, like so many others in United’s squad.
He’s a player we are passing judgment on, harshly, because he has not had that extended run to see if he’s the man for the job. I’d cut him some slack because he was fabulous at Atletico Madrid. Strikers need to be at their sharpest to get goals — they are the ones who need time.
Players also like uniformity, they like to understand what they are doing. This year, with all the chopping and changing, there will be several players who are confused and they will not be slow in using that as an excuse for not playing well. It creates uncertainty within the team if you don’t have the same partner in central defence or the same strike partner or the same central midfield duo.
Having said all that, Arsenal also have flaws and United can exploit them and progress to the semi-finals. I’ve said for years that if Arsenal are confronted with a real physical challenge they tend to wilt. At home the game is there for United if they are aggressive towards Arsenal — and I fully expect them to be.
When United were having great success against Arsenal there was no secret about why: they were really aggressive. Ryan Giggs will be saying the same in the build-up to tomorrow’s match: “We’ve got to set about them, to question if they really fancy the fight.”
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The losers tomorrow could suffer a negative reaction that leads to them finishing outside the top four.
Liverpool are in great shape and are closing in; the momentum is with them. They’ve been playing well and winning games in some style without Steven Gerrard, which is encouraging for them and for their manager. They are the team people are talking about in terms of playing well, scoring goals and moving in the right direction.
United have a question mark hovering above them because of their lack of exciting football. They are grinding out results, as they did at Newcastle in midweek, and staggering towards the finishing line, but they have to play five of the current top seven in their remaining 10 Premier League games.