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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The Kyiv IndependentDmytro Basmat
