It looked like Manchester City was going to get just a second win in 11 games as the Manchester Derby approached the 90-minute mark. It wouldn’t have been very convincing compared to a passive effort from Manchester United, but at least it would have been something. Then Amad Diallo made sure that it was not like that.
1) Of all the Manchester derbies there have been over the years, this was certainly one of them. Surely never in the Premier League era has there been a derby in which both teams were at such a low ebb before the game and this was surely the lowest quality derby in decades.
The utter lack of confidence from both halves of the city oozed out of every pore of this game, from City’s unwillingness, inability or both to do anything at all to build on a scarcely-deserved lead, to United’s lengthy struggles to land any kind of blow on such overtly vulnerable hosts.
2) The thing with a game this poor, though, is to make sure you win it. For most of the afternoon, that appeared to be Man City’s reward for putting their fans through the wringer. Instead, three mad minutes at the end changed absolutely everything.
To be clear, this is in no way a compliment to City’s defensive solidity and organisation, but they were highly unlikely to see what had happened. United had been so desperately poor for so long that it seemed the two groups were simply buying time until the final whistle.
3) Registering slightly with United when they were a goal behind. Their game plan has never changed, their technique is probably still the one they started with the hope of leaving the Etihad with a goalless draw, about 90 more minutes of Ruben Amorim-style adaptation, and calmly moving on to the next one with intact. dignity and a little more confidence.
It took until there were 73 minutes on the clock for United to actually play their way through City’s entirely unconvincing backline, with Noussair Mazraoui and Rasmus Hojlund combining neatly to set Bruno Fernandes through. As Ederson raced out of his goal and over-committed, it appeared certain that Bruno would lift it over him (yes) and into the back of the net (no).
At the time it seemed such a damning criticism of United’s lack of ambition that the only time they had shown a modicum of ambition and quality, they had gone in so easily. It was no wonder why they hadn’t tried a little more often, a little earlier.
4) Clearly, though, they knew something we didn’t. They didn’t need to chase the game; they just had to wait for it come to them. Because City are that bad right now. The equaliser was a catastrophe for Matheus Nunes, who surely couldn’t have believed his luck about what a facile afternoon he’d had up to that point in an unfamiliar position.
He didn’t necessarily look natural in a defensive role, but he didn’t seem like a liability either. It is certainly not opposed to these existing United States.
And then, suddenly, he had a responsibility. The nature of the initial mistake is inexcusable. Someone like Nunes can perhaps be forgiven for a tactical, positional or conscience error in a position to which he is not accustomed. What is not so easily explained, however, is a technical error such as abandoning a back pass a few meters from his goalkeeper as he did here.
United’s best and brightest player of the early Amorim era, Amad Diallo, ran on to it, skipped round Ederson and then appeared not quite sure what to do next. Along came Nunes for part two, though, in full, panicked, desperate attempted-mistake-rectifying mode to hack the United youngster down and turn the game on its head.
5) There is no doubt that Bruno Fernandes would make the mandatory penalty despite his previous mistake. There are many doubts about Gary Neville’s assessment of his mocking celebration of the City. “He’s almost apologising to the City fans. “
It wasn’t.
6) But Amad wasn’t done there. It had seemed fitting that a game so bereft of quality should end in a 1-1 draw from a botched short corner and a careless backpass. Those felt like the goals this game deserved. Amad’s goal appeared not to just belong to a different game but a different sport in a different universe.
It was a breathtaking bit of work. The ball that played him through was good, but the work still required arduous. The touch to lift the ball over and away from Ederson was majestic but still he appeared odds-against to be odds-against to be able to find a finish with the ball dropping awkwardly and two defenders making their way back. He did enough to steer it on target and that was enough.
7) What can be said is that if there is a United player in red who deserved to end the afternoon as an absurd winner in the style of Roy de los Rovers, it is Amad. He is already an eye-catching player since the arrival of Amorim, he is anything. Especial. Su own genius and its general and absolute contrast to almost everything Manchester United has done here.
8) We also want to communicate about the attempt to clear the line by Josko Gvardiol. If you can call it that. While Amad’s dizzying brilliance seemed to have no place in this match, Gvardiol’s goal-saving attempt certainly did. By putting his foot into position, whoever had opened the scoring what seemed like decades before managed to cause a terrible disaster. Amad’s shot inevitably lacked venom given its angle and nature. It wasn’t very effective, but it didn’t do much else.
And the £90m guy managed to miss out entirely. We had to see it 3 times to perceive what it sought to achieve there.
It really is a relief. It would have been so out of place if this mediocre fit had been settled by a purpose that did not have at least one detail of farce.
9) City’s opening goal certainly had that element. The game had been a truly dire spectacle up to that point, and our hope that the goal would liven things up did at least come to pass even if it did take almost an hour.
It is not surprising that the goal comes thanks to a City corner. On the one hand, United concede a large number of corners: it is the eighth such goal to come their way this season, second only to Wolves on this specific list of problems. And on the other hand, surely no one on either side at the time seemed to possess the necessary composure or the means to produce anything in open play. He is almost sterile at the point of Arsenal in that sense.
But was it a wonderfully worked City set-piece that exposed United’s failures, taking them back and forth to praise all the hours put into training? No, it wasn’t. It was a small, missed and poorly worked corner from which Kevin De Bruyne slightly controlled to create a cross chance. That attempt fell diabolically on Amad’s shins, concerned with literally everything that was vital in this attack, and resonated in Gvardiol’s head. .
If ever there were a man whose head is more reliable in big moments than the back of his heel, it is apparently Gvardiol. He planted his header past a flat-footed Onana to give City a lead they didn’t really deserve but United a deficit they probably did. Does that make sense? Also probably no. It was that kind of game.
10) Really, that was the story. When we started writing this, it was “The town was rubbish, but. . . “; now change to “United were trash, but. . . “
We remain properly baffled by how both sides approached this game both before and after that quirky opening goal.
You can just about make a flimsy case that City, in a Bad Moment themselves but recognising an opponent lacking the confidence to exploit it, had some justification for seeking to simply hold what they had and get what would have been just a second win in 11 games. But even had it worked it would have been such a miserable, negative, retrograde tactic. And one just not in keeping with what City have been about.
Almost any other Pep team when sensing the vulnerability United displayed here would have picked them off. City barely even attempted to do so. They created so little and left themselves perennially in a state where one error could leave them undone. And then they committed two errors anyway.
11) We wonder if that’s fair. . . for City now. Everyone was so obsessed with 115 odds as a possible direction towards a more attractive Premier League that perhaps we were all guilty of discovering how old this City team had started to look.
They look very tired, physically and emotionally. Pep Guardiola looks very tired, physically and emotionally. A major rebuild is coming at City, and signing this new contract has not assured us that Guardiola will be in a position to do so after everything he has achieved.
One win in 11 games probably isn’t City’s true level, but we grow more and more confident that the 10 wins and three draws across all competitions with which they started the season was at least as misleading.
This is not the familiar false hope that City presented to their opponents in seasons past before they managed 14 wins in 15 from January to March. These relegations have been nothing more than consecutive defeats or a series of 3 draws in which they have not been able to assert their innate superiority.
Even in those disappointing trials – which have evidently been much shorter than this one – there is still enough evidence beneath the investigation of surface-level effects to trace what is to come.
There is none of that here. They really do look at best like a team in a fight with half-a-dozen other teams for one or two Champions League places. They look a million miles away from a team that’s about to surge through the field and streak clear of everyone again.
12) The focus, perhaps inevitably, has been on players who are not at City. Rodri of course, and also Rubén Dias when he was out. But now it’s time to think about the players who are there. There’s no excuse to be that far away just because a player is out, no matter how smart he is.
It seems that the time has come for the spotlight to turn to De Bruyne. Even as he “created” the first goal here, the loss of precision in his touch and the loss of a meter in his legs were evident. And the challenge for a player like De Bruyne is that it doesn’t matter if the brain maintains its sharpness once the frame starts to disappoint the team.
These things can be almost unnoticeable for a player of De Bruyne’s age (and with his recent injury history) until they are, in fact, very temporary. Lately he seems like the shadow of a player in the shadow of a team.
13) We’re aware that Manchester United have just secured a famous away win at their bitter local rivals and we’re not being particularly enthusiastic about it. We genuinely wish we could be more upbeat about it, but this is still such an early work in progress it feels hard to do so.
Gary Neville got it right in his comments when he pointed out that City, on the other hand, had been even worse in this attack than in this humiliation against Tottenham. United simply lacked, until those crazy final moments, the ability to exploit that weakness.
In a powerfully ‘Manchester United In 2024’ move, this brilliant and improbable victory sends them flying up the table from 13th to… well still 13th, but now a bit closer to Brentford.
It does remain necessary to view all things United through that prism. The bunched-up mid-table morass does mean they are only three points off the top six – and now only five off City in fifth – but hand on heart it’s hard to make a compelling case that anything beyond the badge on their shirts makes them any more convincing a candidate to emerge from the eight-team sludge in the 22-25 point spread.
14) Where it could matter most is much farther away. There can be no true judgment on Amorim’s Manchester United at this time because there is no such thing as Amorim’s Manchester United. We don’t want to relive the mess United created to end 2024 here, however, Amorim is looking to make the most of Erik Ten Hag, an extensively but chaotically compiled team.
You will need time (and we are talking about 3 or 4 movement windows) to get everything into a position to be judged. Premier League football, however, does not lack patience or reason.
There’s a reason why top coaches are generally pretty reluctant to take on a big job mid-season. Amorim himself has already noted how the relentless schedule means training sessions have to be kept low intensity, with United almost walking through the patterns and shapes he is trying to implement.
Trying to completely replace the taste and technique of a team that wasn’t built with that taste and technique from afar is a desperately complicated thing, and even more so when you do it in a club in the toughest conditions. Foci.
Today’s performance might tell us nothing of any real great value about what Amorim’s United might eventually become, but it’s the sort of result that can lift an entire club. It’s the sort of result that gives us a better chance of actually getting to find out what that team might eventually be.
15) The city seems to be just at the other end of this road. It’s been great luck for an incredibly long time. But it’s getting harder and harder to see Guardiola build another wonderful team here. And, above all, it is not an assessment based on those last fatal minutes. Still, it would have been a great conclusion to the unconvincing 1-0 win they seemed destined for.
16) Did we mention it’s a bit rubbish?
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