They played in a way that had Louis van Gaal announcing it was time for supporters to “go on the streets and hold their heads up” and they won with so much to spare it was difficult not to think Manuel Pellegrini’s position at Manchester city might have strayed dangerously close to irretrievable. This was City’s sixth defeat in eight matches and their manager increasingly sounds lost about what has gone wrong.
Nobody said it would be easy getting to the top of a sport and staying there but it is coming up for seven years since the money started pouring in from Abu Dhabi and City’s owners are entitled to expect better than four wins in 15 games.
Ángel Di Maria and Radamel Falcao, the two players who were supposed to spearhead Van Gaal’s first season in charge, did not even set foot on the pitch until it was 4-1. Yet Van Gaal always did say the team’s structure was more important to him than selecting players based purely on their reputations and, slowly but surely, the evidence is being seen.
Who could have thought, for example, that one of the forgotten men, Ashley Young, would hold this kind of influence when the superstars started arriving? Or that the coach who once led a brilliant, slick Ajax side to the European Cup would ever laud Marouane Fellaini’s ability to “play the ball to the same colour [shirt] every time”? Young and Fellaini have taken turns as the two players United’s crowd disliked the most. Yet Fellaini is now being acclaimed in a way that was once implausible while Young is playing with enough distinction that the watching England manager, Roy Hodgson, must be considering a recall.
