AND SO THE season ends with Erik ten Hag wheeling around to face Jim Ratcliffe: Just try sacking me now!
It does feel churlish and faintly grubby to subsume the sheer glory of this FA Cup triumph to the machinations and intrigues of Manchester United Inc; to take the entire point of this pursuit – winning trophies and building memories – and warp it to fit into the endless whirr of speculation about sackings and clear-outs and power games at Old Trafford.
If Louis van Gaal was knifed shortly after his FA Cup triumph, it felt like ten Hag was condemned ahead of it, this game functioning as his final meal.
But after this afternoon is digested, does United’s manager get a stay of execution?
Reports yesterday suggested that United would sack ten Hag regardless of today’s result, but will the living through the result change things?
This is why football often resists the clean and cold logic of business: it is not a normal business. The moments between the meetings keep clouding people’s brain with gorgeous, maddening, seductive, actually-if-you-think-about-it-again emotion.
On one level, this was a resolute triumph for Erik ten Hag: the players he has blooded and the system he has drilled was enough to scuttle the most invincible-seeming team in English football history.
But on another level, does anything that happened today really change the grander picture? Here United did brilliantly what we have always known they can do well: sit deep and counter with devastation. Nothing changes the appalling realities of their league season: the eighth-placed finish, the 14 defeats, the negative goal difference, the historic avalanche of shots faced.
Ten Hag was brought on to add more control to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s counter-punching red arrows, but that project has been an abject failure. Look at the season’s league table.
And yet beating Liverpool and Manchester City to seal the FA Cup having won the League Cup a year earlier feels like it should count for something when Jim Ratcliffe’s new laptop-wielding Camelot gather to make the final decision.
United did benefit from catching a Man City side labouring from either their league-victory hangover or else some very rare complacency. There are defeats in which Pep Guardiola doesn’t make a single substitute: he made two at half-time and then hooked Kevin De Bruyne only 11 minutes later. The ultimate indictment.
Only Jeremy Doku came out of the game with any credit for City. His late goal glossed the scoreboard and jangled nerves but City never truly looked like equalising, in spite of a generous seven minutes of added time.
Otherwise City were slow and sloppy, Stefan Ortega and Josko Gvardiol getting themselves in a complete mess to allow Garnacho tap in United’s opening goal. More shocking was their lack of intensity in trying to prevent United’s smooth and brilliant second goal. They effectively waved United up the pitch to score, their last resort being Kyle Walker roaring at Kobbie Mainoo in a forlorn bid to put him off as he took his goal.
City provided the canvas for United to paint a thing of beauty, in which each pass was better than the next. Bruno Fernandes’ delicate, disguised pass to Mainoo was a fitting flourish.
Guardiola picked Mateo Kovacic alongside Rodri to control the game and cut United’s transition threat off at source, but City moved the ball slowly and bloodlessly with almost all of their key players enduring personal nightmares. De Bruyne was anonymous, Walker was dozy, and Foden gave the ball away more often than he had all season. A search party may yet be called to locate Erling Haaland, who allegedly played.
City’s bizarre topor was summed up just after half-time, when Rodri decided to shank a hopeless shot to goal midway inside his own half. Rodri is his team’s central nervous system: this was the stuff of bizarre malfunction. Guardiola looked at Rodri with the withering disgust of a French waiter who had just been asked to make sure the steak was well done.
United were boosted by the returns of Raphael Varane and Lisandro Martinez, and so they defended their box superbly, and only Andre Onana’s late mistake allowed City to score. Yet there was no sense of siege from City nor desperation from United, and they closed out a deserved victory with relative ease.
Not so easy now is the decision to be made by United’s hierarchy.
