Suffering a home defeat at the hands of Swansea City, the much anticipated Louis van Gaal revolution got off to a truly terrible start. Hamstrung by injuries to Michael Carrick, Luke Shaw, Robin van Persie, Antonio Valencia, Jonny Evans and Danny Welbeck, United’s starting eleven looked particularly weak. While some of the starters for the home team were new, the final score had an all too familiar, sickening feel. Experimenting with a 3-4-1-2/3-5-2 system throughout the preseason, the formations that looked so effective a few weeks ago looked absolutely ineffective on Saturday afternoon.
Hats off to Gary Monk, though, he recognized the weakness and capitalized on it.
While Swansea played decent football, United fans may now appreciate that the Red’s rehabilitation will take far longer than one transfer window. Saturday’s dismal performance delivered cold, hard evidence that the mere arrival of LvG cannot compensate for countless deficiencies. Make no mistake, this performance closely resembled last season’s nonsense, when the Red Devils limped to a pathetic seventh-place finish and David Moyes was shown the door in an unceremonious fashion.
A real feeling of déjà vu swept around Old Trafford, the all too sobering reality quickly erased any delirious dreams of a Dutch deity producing some sort of water into wine, Jesus Christ-inspired miracle. Not much has changed, this is still the team that finished seventh last season, 22 points off Manchester City and radically immersed in a pit of indolence. Absolutely devoid of any dynamism, van Gaal’s men seemed to accept they were destined for defeat long before the final whistle.
In the face of losing Pablo Hernandez and Michu, Swansea remain a respectable side, while United remain look at least three players short of a top four challenging team. Even though the season has just begun, the manner in which United played will concern fans, especially after all the ridiculous hype and sensationalistic speculations.
Handing Premier League debuts to left-back Tyler Blackett and midfielder Jesse Lingard, young men fresh off the conveyor belt, van Gaal must have known that he was playing with fire. And as we saw with David Moyes, last season, sometimes you get badly burnt. Although the ex Netherlands manager famously nurtured Clarence Seedorf as a teenager and gave Thomas Müller his debut, he is not giving Blackett and Lingard a chance because he ‘believes’ in them, he is doing so because United severely lack talent.
Monk and his disciples were too shrewd for United, defending in numbers then counterattacking briskly, a tactic that culminated in Gylfi Sigurdsson’s 72nd-minute winning goal. Impressing heavily in his second spell with the Welsh outfit, Sigurdsson also played a vital role in Swansea’s first goal. Ki’s unlocking of the United defence was cancelled out by Wayne Rooney’s second half response. Hooking in a flick on from the ever erratic Phil Joness, the 28 year old striker was the only United player to display any real hunger.
After the captain’s equalizer, surely a win for one of the biggest clubs in world football was inevitable. Think again, although the crowd sensed a turning of the tides, this discernment turned out to be little more than a false impression. Whether we focus on the lack of pace, the sheer unreliability of Chris Smalling and Phil Jones, or the obvious lack of flamboyance, this team more closely resembled Sheffield United, certainly not the once almighty Manchester United. The delicate nature of LvG’s squad has been aggravated by an exhausting injury list and a lack of meaningful acquisitions. Will this problem be rectified by August 31st? An educated guess screams one word – NO.
Recording their first-ever league win at Old Trafford, Swansea turned the Theatre of Dreams into a platform of panic. Along with netting United’s solitary goal, Rooney came close to grabbing a second with a free-kick that battered the woodwork.
One would assume that van Gaal borrowed Fergie’s hair dryer at halftime; he had just witnessed 45 minutes of rubbish. Changing to a more conventional 4-2-3-1 formation, the consistently inconsistent Ashley Young was moved to left-back. Deciding to shuffle the desperate deck even further, the utterly useless Nani replaced the far more useful Javier Hernandez. Fleetingly, progress looked possible. Wayne Routledge’s mistimed shot that ended up falling at Sigurdsson’s feet soon put an end to any notions of a home win. Old Trafford was well and truly silenced when the ball trickled past De Gea, a goal that summed up a messy, disorganized United performance.
A disturbing start to the season for Van Gaal and definitely an unforeseen result, the rehabilitated sense of buoyancy around the red half of Manchester was quickly extinguished around 2.30pm on Saturday. He may have led his nation to a third-place finish in Brazil but he surely cannot do that with United this season, can he? With no European football this season, United could very well string some decent results together, but this seems very improbable, all the more so if new faces and superior defensive displays are not visible very soon.
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