What do Cristiano Ronaldo, Sadio Mane and Laurent Robert have in common with a couple of Arsenal icons? Backheel goalscoring brilliance for one.

Sadio Mane v Watford
The ball comes out to the right about 30 yards out. It is fired in as a putative cross. The defenders all move out to catch Liverpool offside but don’t do it quickly enough and leave Mane isolated ahead of the defence on the penalty spot but onside. He takes the ball down with his back to goal and as the keeper advances, backheels it over him and into the middle of the net. That’s just taking the pish.

Daniel Sturridge v Sunderland
This is before he did that daft wiggly arms thing, briefly so popular with six-year-olds.

A ball is played long from midfield for Sturridge to run onto, hustled by a defender, into the penalty area. He’s running away from goal, driven wide as the keeper advances, grovelling at his feet. He backheels it past him into the far left of the goal, bouncing into the net off the post. He was good, you know – but made of pastry.

Laurent Robert v Fulham
He didn’t score tap-ins. This extraordinary athletic backheel happened after a ball is crossed from the right at head height to the centre of the box. Robert leaps into the air and is in entirely the wrong position to head it, so somehow he contrives to get his legs to head height, turns in mid-air, back to the goal and does a backheel volley over his own head into the right-hand corner of the net. He played for Derby for half of that record-breaking awful season, you know.

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Bruno Guimaraes v Southampton
If he hadn’t had his back to goal in a crowded penalty, 10 yards out, this would have been a straightforward volley into the net but as the ball comes in from a corner on the right which is headed into the centre of the goal from the left, he backheels a powerful volley in almost casually. Almost worth being from Byker, obese and half-naked for.

Callum Wilson v West Brom
In that brief half hour when he wasn’t out injured, Wilson was a good striker.

In this game, the ball is fired in at pace from the right into the area. Wilson, who is watching the player hit the ball, has his back to goal and instead of controlling it, turning and shooting, he somehow backheels it into the bottom left corner. It all happens in a few seconds. The ball probably bruised his foot and put him out for a month.

Cristiano Ronaldo v Aston Villa
Back when Manchester United weren’t a bad joke and they employed top-rank footballers, the ball rattles around a crowded penalty area from a corner, arrives at CR7’s feet and he fails to properly control it. This meant he was forced to flick at it with his heel. It trickles into the centre of the net and the ego on legs runs away in celebration as though he has scored a superhuman goal. He’s quick to look at the big screen to check it was as brilliant as he suspected, what with him being brilliant and everything.

Thierry Henry v Charlton
He was a clever boy. The ball is fired in from the right into Thierry’s feet. He has a defender, what a doctor would diagnose as ‘up his arse’, giving him close attention. Both their backs are to goal, six yards out. How to score? Easy, backheel it hard through the defender’s legs, past the goalkeeper and into the corner of the net. At first it looks like magic and you don’t even realise for a second what he’s done.

Charlton in the Premier League – imagine that!

Leon Bailey v Hoffenheim
This is spectacular precisely because it is so deliberate, unlike more instinctive efforts. The ball is fired into Bailey from the right. He’s centrally positioned, but has his back to goal. He controls it, gets his feet into position and backheels the ball with force with his left foot into the goal. The keeper is beaten for pace. That’ll get you a move to Aston Villa.

Valentino Lazaro v Leverkusen
There are quite a few examples of this. Basically, it looks like he’s fallen over head-first and as he sprawls forward, he raises his heel and volleys it goalwards from a cross on the right. I think it’s entirely deliberate and rescues an inaccurate cross but it doesn’t look like it. ‘Yeah, of course I meant it, boss.’

Olivier Giroud v Crystal Palace
The well-groomed Frenchman scored one of those Scorpion-kick type goals, falling forward six feet ahead of the ball, but being aware enough to hold out his left leg as the ball comes over and he connects with speed and power into the top corner. He obviously just improvised on the spot as the ball was delivered behind him. I bet it caused Peter Drury to shout his full name loudly and annoyingly.

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Man Utd legend Gary Neville thinks Ruben Amorim needs to copy Enzo Maresca at Chelsea and be more consistent with his team selection.

The Red Devils lost their sixth game of the season in a 3-2 defeat to Nottingham Forest on Saturday with Amorim’s side dropping to 13th in the Premier League table.

Nikola Milenkovic put Forest ahead in under two minutes with a brilliant header before Rasmus Hojlund got Man Utd back on level terms on 18 minutes.

Morgan Gibbs-White then nudged the visitors back in front just after half-time with a long-range shot which Man Utd goalkeeper Andre Onana should have saved.

Nottingham Forest were soon 3-1 up when Chris Wood headed in after a mix-up between Lisandro Martinez and Onana before Bruno Fernandes swept in a 61st-minute strike to make it 3-2.

However, Man Utd could not get the equaliser in another poor performance and it’s evident Amorim will not be the quick fix that many fans had hoped.

And Neville reckons the new Man Utd head coach needs to give himself a chance by starting a team consistently after making four changes after their midweek defeat to Arsenal.

Neville said on NBC Sports: “When you keep changing players, when you keep changing your back three, you take five players off, you’re basically saying to all of them effectively, because they’ve obviously been left out of the start of the game, is that you don’t trust them.

“Ten Hag kept doing that a few weeks ago, he kept changing the back players, changing the midfield, all of a sudden you’ve got a completely different system, a completely different set of players on the pitch at the end of the game and you never get stability or consistency.

“There’s just an element of just leave the players on. They weren’t playing that bad in the first half, obviously they were undermined by the set-pieces in terms of the corners but the football generally wasn’t that bad.

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“Then you allow two mistakes that were made after half time within the first 10 minutes to undermine you, then you basically make changes and all of a sudden everything falls to pieces.

“It looked really scruffy, really scruffy, it looked a mess at the end, with no real shape. I actually think at least in the first half they weren’t brilliant but at least they had a shape to them.

“I think I said this with Ten Hag for about 12 months – pick an eleven that you think are the best.

“I thought today, we all agreed before the game, we thought that eleven, apart from Luke Shaw, was close to United’s best eleven as you could get.

“I’m not saying don’t make a substitution but almost give that eleven the faith and trust.

“Maresca is doing it now at Chelsea, he’s playing an eleven on a Sunday or a Saturday and then he’s playing a different eleven in midweek. He’s sending some messages to the players that there’s stability here, this is what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to play, this is an idea I believe in.

“When you change players all the time you’re almost saying to everybody you’re just juggling plates all the time, there’s no consistency or familiarity that can build with players, you need to build patterns together, you need to build an idea of what you’re doing together and they can never do that if you’re changing players in all areas of the pitch.”

The storm has come.

Ruben Amorim predicted the storm was coming for Manchester United ahead of a key early week in his reign, and the good news for the United manager there is that he was absolutely right.

There was a callow, naive weakness to the defeat at Arsenal in midweek. Not all or even mainly Amorim’s fault, of course, but a significant reminder of the scale of the job at hand. But that was bearable. Painful, but bearable. A big part of the reason why Amorim is here in the first place is that United have fallen such a long way behind Arsenal.

It’s not a pleasant sensation for United, but nor is it a new one. Following that predictable if unpalatable defeat with this sloppy, error-strewn home beating from Nottingham Forest takes us into more serious waters for Amorim even this early.

Not a great look for any manager at any time, for instance, when his team concedes tamely within two minutes in each half. Doesn’t exactly point to a team sent out absolutely ready to go from the first minute.

They were such bad goals, too. Surely one major advantage of having three centre-backs is that it leaves simply no need to have Lisandro Martinez in an embarrassing mismatch against Nikola Milenkovic from a corner. Conceding an early goal was a bad start; conceding an early goal from a corner, after what happened at Arsenal, only made it worse.

The start of the second half produced a very weird moment from Andre Onana, who made a rare bollocks of dealing with Morgan Gibbs-White’s swerving effort. There was power and movement here, sure, but nothing that should have so thoroughly bamboozled a keeper of Onana’s standing.

Little the manager can do about that, of course, but the response to that setback from United was… not good. Chris Wood was the next man to get himself into a cheat-code aerial contest with The Butcher, with Onana’s uncertainty under the delivery and then Wood’s looping header also a bit of a worrying look.

Amorim will be learning all the time about his players, and we suppose a grudging positive from the week will be the fact there is more to be learned from adversity than the good times.

And there are crumbs here, if you really must find them. The response to Forest’s opening goal was excellent. As bad a goal as it was to concede, United responded with what would alas turn out to be their best spell of the match in the 15 minutes up to Rasmus Hojlund’s equaliser.

United struggled to maintain that intensity, though, when the game appeared there to be grasped. This is still a team, a squad, a club riddled with uncertainty about how it’s supposed to be going about things.

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A brilliantly taken Bruno Fernandes goal gave United 30 minutes plus stoppages to get something out of the game, and it is perhaps that final period that sits as the most damning. They just never really looked like they were getting anywhere.

If Bruno had not picked up a knock, his removal 15 minutes from time was puzzling. He had appeared by far United’s likeliest source of redemption.

The closest they came was a couple of speculative injury-time efforts from corners. Marcus Rashford’s strike was deflected wide, Martinez’s acrobatic volley flashed over the bar. There would have been something about the game starting and ending with such a conspicuous contribution from Martinez at a set-piece.

Instead, that defining moment was left again to Onana, who wasted several precious seconds in an argument he could not win with the referee over the specific placement of a free-kick inside his own half. It appeared clear evidence of the virtue of picking one’s battles even before Onana’s eventual lump forward produced nothing of note.

Forest, though. They’re now back up to fifth in the table. That might well be a Champions League spot when the music stops anyway, and they’re only two points behind an actual definite one.

They deserved this win just as they did their earlier eye-catching success at Anfield. Nuno Espirito Santo has orchestrated a couple of truly famous Forest wins among plenty of other successes this season. Whether the current European charge is maintained or not, Nuno and Forest have taken relegation off the table and out of the equation well before Christmas.

United have no such certainties about the viability of their season’s goals.

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