The Red Devils face an uphill battle to knock off their in-form rivals, who have reinvented themselves
There is a specific class of achievements in English football that matter so significantly because there is no other club that they must be shared with, essentially not in living memory. One can banter for a significant length of time whether Manchester City’s Centurions were superior to Arsenal’s Invincibles, consensus won’t ever arise. Each fanbase clutches this specific group so firmly to its heart and understandably so. They are not for sharing.
That is the grim fear or the great opportunity that hangs over Manchester United going into Saturday’s FA Cup final. They might always be the first treble (by which we mean the leading three trophies: Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League) winners in English football, how much sweeter would it be to be the only ones? Many of those who take to the Wembley field will have no memories of Teddy Sheringham’s heroics and Peter Schmeichel cartwheels in the Camp Nou 24 years ago but they will surely comprehend the importance for their club of being the ones who stop City in their path. After all, their supporters wouldn’t let them forget it.
Ten Witch could openly guarantee that it about United can win, not what they can stop City getting – – but how might he at some point say anything else? He must know reality. Losing on Saturday would constitute an existential blow for his club if, as expected, Kick Guardiola overcomes Inter Milan seven days after the fact. It wouldn’t just be that City have staked a case to the treble that they own. It would be that United couldn’t stop them from doing so.
Underpinning United’s methodology on Saturday will be the conviction that they would be able. Indeed they have done so fairly much of the time, winning four and drawing one of their last 10 meetings. Any rival who can say it just loses 50% of the opportunity to Guardiola’s City can take a lot of conviction, not least because they beat them last break, a thrilling 2-1 victory at Old Trafford that momentarily raised hopes that the Red Devils could possibly contend with their crosstown rivals for the Chief Association title.
“It’s truly agreeable to watch Manchester City but we need to stop them,” Ten Witch told the BBC in front of Saturday. “We need to make it our game. We demonstrated we can beat them but we need to play to our levels. Assuming we have conviction, on one day everything is possible.”
That final sentence is perhaps as accurate a distillation as one could wish for of where Manchester United are a year into the Dutchman’s project. They lack the cohesion of a team that has had years to establish themselves and they urgently need an injection of quality in at least two key positions, goalkeeper and center forward. However, in one-off games against the very best, they can deliver something remarkable, on occasion for worse but in thrilling wins against Barcelona, Arsenal and City, very much for the better.
There has been something about United in recent years that suits playing City. The Red Devils are a team that thrives in transition; no team registered more fast breaks in the 2022-23 Premier League than their 38. Given that it is no great surprise that they also ended the campaign with the most expected goals and actual goals from such passages of play. When Ten Hag’s side (and indeed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s before him) win the ball back in advanced positions they are as capable as any team in the league of executing a string of quick passes that get one of their forwards bearing down on goal. That makes for a great matchup against a City side who, in the past, could all too frequently find that their vice-like grip on the contest had seen them shift almost their entire XI into the opposition third.
January’s meeting between these two, a 2-1 win for the hosts at Old Trafford, could usually serve as the layout for how United beat City: riding out the possession pressure, pouncing on sloppy mistakes and striking with precision. That much was apparent as soon as the ninth minute when Bernardo Silva played a clumsy pass into a dead zone, Marcus Rashford stealing in and slipping a pass through to Bruno Fernandes, who might proceed to drive wide of Ederson’s far post.
United rode some of the City pressure successfully because of their man-to-man defensive system, Ten Witch’s midfield tracking their counterparts as the Citizens pushed the ball out wide. It was from that point that they were most viable at forcing turnovers, whether they be through a rare loose pass by Bernardo or driving their opponents into a pressing snare.
Perhaps most significant of all to United, however, was the presence of Joao Cancelo in the City back four. The Portuguese international, presently borrowed at Bayern Munich, was an all-powerful weapon in Guardiola’s possession arsenal but he was seemingly a minus defender. Certainly, he was on this occasion, note in the picture over that he is not even in shot.
In the development to United’s balancer, a contentious second where Rashford was pronounced to not be offside because he didn’t touch a pass that was intended for him, Cancelo goes careening up the contribute an endeavor to steal the ball for City as Aaron Wan-Bissaka tries to play in Antony. There is nothing necessarily amiss with his instincts – – that is the approach to playing that has won this group so a lot – – but when he can’t get close to the ball United find themselves with a four-on-three situation.
Wyscout’s archives of United’s January win has six goalscoring opportunities for the hosts. Somewhere around four could reasonably be considered to have come from direct transitional play. The issue for Ten Witch, however, is that opportunities like theirs may just be less and further between this time round against a rival that is enormously different from the one they beat last break.
Cancelo is gone, in his place a defense that can contain as many as four focal defenders (Kyle Walker could have spent most of his career as an overlapping right back but he has helped out exchange more interior work for some time now). Rather than the Portuguese drifting into midfield, it tends to be John Stones stepping out of the core of defense to accomplice alongside Rodri. The system looks the same in possession, a 3-2-5 or 3-2-2-3, but there is an unbending nature to it in transitional moments that didn’t occur when the full backs inverted. Opponents normally endeavor to counter City down the flanks but as of late they have gone flying toward world class one-on-one defenders in Walker, Manuel Akanji and Nathan Ake. The last option specifically has demonstrated he can secure the left flank all alone, he averages one lost challenge at regular intervals, five full games and change.
This time around there are no dopes for United to rope. It is a sign of City’s overwhelming quality of playing and coaching staff that midway through a season where they scarcely have a week off they can carry out a fairly significant reinvention of their defensive structure and not only not miss a beat but rise to even greater heights. They have become the sort of team that would be eminently worthy of winning the treble. It will be an almighty challenge for United to stop them.
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