Fulham 0-1 Man Utd (Martinez 78′)
CRAVEN COTTAGE — Rasmus Hojlund is treading in the footsteps of some high-calibre failures at the point of the Manchester United attack.
In the days before Anthony Martial there was Ted MacDougall, a record signing from Bournemouth in the early 1970s, Garry Birtles and Peter Davenport, neither of whom excelled on their arrival from Nottingham Forest a decade later. Ditto Alan Brazil from Tottenham Hotspur.
MacDougall was a punt from Bournemouth, then a lower league staple for whom selling on a player was the only way of making a few quid or creating a stir. United were in steep decline and heading for the second tier. Sound familiar?
Hojlund was reintroduced to the starting line-up here without any real sense that he would make any difference, but what else is Ruben Amorim to do? The alternative is Joshua Zirkzee, and he started the last two games.
Zirkzee, Hojlund, Hojlund, Zirkzee, it’s all the same in this ineffective ensemble. No difference at all, despite the £100m it cost to put them together. Everything fell apart around Hojlund. The ball comes in, fails to stick, he wrestles himself to the ground, appeals to the referee, and on we go.
It is not entirely his fault. He might have thought he was joining a club that played with wingers, wide men who hit the byline and flooded the box with peachy passes. At least that is what it says in the brochure.
Amorim gave his own view of the status of this team, a flailing, falling giant that has lost all sense of itself.
The worst of all time? Who knows? The most boring, quite possibly.
There is still no attacking shape of which to speak, no tactical or technical design that throws United forward. Only one team showed any initiative here. Harry Maguire, Matthijs de Ligt and Lisandro Martinez endlessly recycling the ball back to Andre Onana is not the part of any United style book, yet this is what they have become.
Huge collision 💥
Lisandro Martinez may have gotten away with one for his challenge on Adama Traore 👀
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This featureless landscape is so embedded you wonder what the coaching staff do all day. Lesson planning does not appear to be part of it, still less lesson learning. You can’t train a fluke, of course, which was the mechanism Martinez deployed to nick the win, his shot taking a vicious deflection off Sasa Lukic.
And this is the club around which a regeneration dream is being sold, the vision for Manchester’s future has United in a shiny new edifice capable of hosting 100,000 souls, rubber stamped by the state. Work could start before the end of this year according to the more optimistic claims. Please let us know when you have any plans for building a team to go with it.
The absence of a commanding figure anywhere in red continues to perplex, a player to lift those around him, to take responsibility, to shake a fist. Fulham appeared to move quicker, run harder and with greater purpose. It feels like United are invested in the idea of their own drama, their own dysfunction, like some great dynastic decline and fall.
Hojlund’s departure shortly before the hour was inevitable, his body language screaming misery. There was nil sense then that victory might follow. Amorim has had enough bad days to accept any gifts fate may bestow.
His joyless outfit was second best all over the park, seemingly without an idea how to change the dynamic before Martinez registered United’s only shot on target, and that a looping deflection off the unfortunate Lukic just a couple of yards away.
Amorim almost threw himself into the arms of his Portuguese counterpart Marco Silva at the end, as if embarrassed to have picked the pocket of his team.
“It was not a great performance from my team,” he said. “You need some luck sometimes. But we need to improve.”
It was only the sixth defeat of the season for Silva, who bemoaned a lack of cutting edge. Ex-Arsenal tricksters Alex Iwobi and Emile Smith-Rowe moved the ball well, frequently combining down the left, but too often the ball failed to find a white shirt.
Behind them Sander Berge was a bruising presence, breaking forward at pace and at will. And at the back Joachim Anderson had one of his easiest games watching Hojlund disintegrate under his nose.
In the hipster league with Brighton, Bournemouth, Brentford and Forest, Fulham are missing a poacher. Raul Jimenez lacks the pace to get past defenders and Adama Traore does not have the wit to make the most of his quick feet, and explosiveness.
However, he had enough about him to swerve the oncoming Martinez and spare both the consequences of the Argentine’s rash intervention. Since there was no contact, Martinez did not meet the threshold for red. Lucky boy.