Manchester City looked set for just a second win in 11 games as the Manchester Derby ticked towards 90 minutes. It would have been deeply unconvincing against a confused and passive Manchester United effort, but at least it would have been something. Then Amad Diallo made sure it was nothing.
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 meant in no way as a compliment to City’s solidity and defensive organisation, but it really was impossible to see what happened actually happening. United had been so desperately poor for so desperately long that it appeared both teams were just marking time until the final whistle.
3. It barely seemed to have even registered with United that they were a goal down. Their gameplan never changed, their approach still apparently the one they’d started with in hoping to emerge from the Etihad with a goalless draw, another 90 minutes of adapting to Ruben Amorim’s style, and move quietly on to the next one with dignity intact and a sliver 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 appeared such a damning indictment of United’s lack of ambition that the one time they’d actually showed a modicum of ambition and quality they’d got in so easily. It was impossible not to wonder why they hadn’t tried it a bit more often a bit 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 hadn’t necessarily looked a natural in a defensive role, but nor had he appeared a liability. Certainly not against this current United.
And then suddenly he absolutely was a liability. The nature of the initial error is unforgivable. Someone like Nunes could perhaps be forgiven a tactical or positional or awareness mistake in a position to which he is so unaccustomed. What can’t be so easily explained away, though, is a technical mistake like leaving a backpass yards short of his keeper 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 was little doubt Bruno Fernandes would do the necessary from the spot despite his earlier miss. Plenty of doubt about Gary Neville’s assessment of his City-mocking celebration. ‘He’s almost apologising to the City fans.’
He really 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 does need saying is that if there was one player in United red who deserved to end the afternoon as a Roy of the Rovers style absurd matchwinner, Amad was that man. Already the standout player since Amorim’s arrival, this was something special. His own brilliance and its utter, absolute contrast with almost everything else Manchester United did here.
8. We do also need to talk about Josko Gvardiol’s attempted clearance off the line. If we can even call it that. While Amad’s dizzying brilliance didn’t feel like it belonged in this game, Gvardiol’s attempt to prevent the goal absolutely did. Having got his feet in the wrong place, the man who had opened the scoring what felt like several decades earlier managed to make a horrible mess of things. Amad’s shot, inevitably, lacked venom given the angle and nature of it. It wasn’t quite trickling, but it wasn’t doing much more than that.
And the £90m man managed to miss it altogether. We had to watch it three times to even work out what he’d attempted to achieve there.
Really it was a relief. It would have been so thoroughly out of place for this p*ss-poor game to have been settled by a goal that didn’t have at least some element of farce to it.
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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 was no great surprise to see the goal arrive courtesy of a City corner. For one thing, United concede from an awful lot of corners – this was the eighth such goal against them this season, second only to Wolves in that particular list of woe. And for another, absolutely nobody on either side at that time appeared to possess either the requisite composure or wherewithal to produce something from open play. It was near Arsenal-level barren in that regard.
But was it a wonderfully worked City set-piece that exposed United’s failings, pulling them this way and that to reward all the hours put in on the training pitch? No, it was not. It was in truth a bungled, poorly-worked short corner from which Kevin De Bruyne only just managed to manufacture a crossing chance at all. That attempt spun devilishly off the shins of Amad – involved in quite literally everything of note in this match, then – and looped on to the head of Gvardiol.
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 United 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 of it. When we started writing this it was “City were rubbish, but…”; now it just shifts slightly to “United were rubbish, 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 really do find ourselves wondering if this is just… it for City now. Everyone got so fixated on the 115 charges as the potential road to a more interesting Premier League that we were perhaps all guilty of taking our eye just how old that City squad had started to look.
They do look very tired, physically and emotionally. Pep Guardiola does look very tired, physically and emotionally. There is a chunky rebuild coming at City, and signing that new contract has not really filled us with great reassurance that Guardiola is really all that up for it after all he’s 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 City have offered rivals in previous seasons before reeling off 14 wins in 15 from January to March. Those dips have usually been nothing more than back-to-back defeats or a run of three draws in which they have somehow failed to make their innate superiority tell.
Even in those disappointing runs – which have also very obviously been much, much shorter than this one – there has usually still been sufficient evidence below surface-level result analysis to hint at what’s around the corner.
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 the players who aren’t there for City. Rodri most obviously, and also Ruben Dias when he was out. But it must now be time to consider the players who are. There really cannot be any excuse for being this far off it just because one player is absent, no matter how good that one player may be.
It does seem like it might be time for the spotlight to fall on De Bruyne. Even in ‘creating’ the opening goal here the loss of precision in his touch and the loss of half-a-yard in his legs was apparent. And the problem for a player like De Bruyne is that it doesn’t really matter if the mind retains its razor sharpness once the body starts to let the side down.
These things can happen almost imperceptibly to a player at De Bruyne’s age – and with his recent injury record – right up until they happen very quickly indeed. He currently looks a shadow of a player in a 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 nailed it on commentary when noting that City had, if anything, been even worse in this game than they were in that humbling against Tottenham. United just lacked – until those wild final moments – the ability to pounce upon 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 a bit closer to Brentford at least.
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 may matter more is much further down the line. There can be no true judgement of Amorim’s Manchester United at this time because there is no Amorim’s Manchester United. We don’t need to relitigate the mess United made to end 2024 here, but this is Amorim trying to make the best of Erik ten Hag’s expensively but shambolically compiled squad.
He is going to need time – and we’re talking three or four transfer windows’ worth – to put together anything upon which he can reasonably be judged. Premier League football, though, is blessed with neither patience nor reasonableness.
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 change the style and approach of a squad that has not been built with that style and approach remotely in mind is a desperately difficult thing to do, and even more so when you’re doing it at a club permanently under the harshest of spotlights.
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.
16. City really do appear to be right at the other end of that road. It’s been enormously successful for an enormously long time. But it grows harder and harder to see Guardiola building another great team here. And crucially, that is not an assessment formed on the basis of those mortifying final minutes. It would still have been a major takeaway from the deeply unconvincing 1-0 win they seemed destined for.
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