The berserker roars of Erling Haaland announced that Manchester City had just won the kind of victory in which a new team spirit is forged.
Haaland’s record at Old Trafford until this point had been one easy win and two defeats. Now he was celebrating the sweetest thing in football – the hard-fought victory on a day when all had seemed lost.
It had been another generally mediocre Premier League game in a post-World Cup season opening that has thus far been extremely underwhelming. As so often, the game was dominated by two bad refereeing decisions. Not only did VAR do little to correct or mitigate the errors, it actually inserted a game-deciding mistake by reversing a correct offside decision that had been made by the assistant referee.
The first mistake looked like it would decide the game for United, and actually ended up benefiting City.
The sensible decision would be to book both players and move on. But Michael Oliver decided Phil Foden deserved a red card for kicking out at Bruno Fernandes, and VAR decided to overlook the awkward fact that this had been provoked by Fernandes kicking out twice at Foden, the second time while he lay on the ground.
Fernandes helped make up Oliver’s mind by writhing on the ground as though Foden had actually hurt him. Watching this ridiculous scene, Haaland would have recalled the fateful moment last April when he did not have the presence of mind to react in like fashion when he was lightly headbutted by Gabriel.
Haaland was widely praised for his manliness and sporting spirit. Gabriel escaped a red card and a three-match suspension, and Arsenal went on to win the league. The message was clear – TV refs can’t be counted on to spot injustice, but they will invariably reward theatrics. Intelligent players will act accordingly.
Still, if City could have chosen a player to lose to a red card, it would have been Foden, who has hardly played a good game since winning both Footballer of the Year awards in 2024.
The sending-off had a clarifying effect on Enzo Maresca’s team. Enzo Fernandez had spent the first 20 minutes or so loitering in the space behind Haaland, leaving Elliot Anderson isolated in central midfield. Now he dropped deeper alongside his partner and became more involved in the play.
More important than the tactical effect was the psychological one. City had been the victims of what they saw as an injustice. Anger gave them strength. “We knew we just had to run more and fight more,” Anderson reflected later.
United, on the other hand, had been transformed in the same instant from underdogs to favourites. A home crowd that had begun the game in hope now watched in expectation. In the post-Ferguson era, expectation is United’s Kryptonite. Rather than seize the day, Michael Carrick’s team wilted.
Maresca made his first change at half-time, withdrawing Rayan Cherki for Iliman N’Diaye. This change was effective, with Ndiaye’s ability to dribble long distances and hold on to the ball under pressure buying City valuable seconds in possession.
Carrick took until the 67th minute to make his first substitution and you had to wonder: what is he waiting for? When the change finally came, it was Youri Tielemans who surprisingly made way for Benjamin Šeško.
Maybe Carrick had concluded that Fernandes was dropping so deep – as though he was still playing deep central midfield in Ruben Amorim’s accursed 3-4-2-1 – that there was no point in Tielemans being there as well.
It might have been better for United had Fernandes stayed further forward, in the areas where he could be more dangerous. But Carrick seems to leave those decisions up to the players.
United’s inability to come up with solutions will have been worrying for the United power brokers, commencing their second managerial “project” since Jim Ratcliffe assumed control of football affairs in 2024. In a way, the challenge of this game after Foden’s red was the task of United’s season in miniature.
It’s one thing to take over a suffering team that is already out of contention for the big prizes and improve their form in the short term. We saw Ole Gunnar Solskjær do this at United in 2020. Kenny Dalglish did something similar at Liverpool in 2011.
The struggles both endured after that initial success showed that proving you can cope with serious expectation from the beginning and properly compete with the heavyweights is a different and much harder challenge.
Carrick described the refereeing fiasco that ultimately decided the game as “staggering” – a choice of word that highlighted his inexperience. He’ll eventually get used to it if he sticks around long enough.
It was obvious to everybody that when the clearly offside Fernandez launched himself at Joško Gvardiol’s deflected cross and missed his attempted diving header by a couple of millimetres, he was attempting to play the ball. It was obvious that he was affecting United’s closest defender, Lisandro Martinez, who would otherwise have had an uncomplicated task to clear the ball before it reached the goalscorer, Haaland. All this was obvious to the linesman, who flagged for offside.
The offside was obvious to everybody, that is, except the video refs, who decided after multiple reviews that as Fernandez had not actually touched the ball despite launching every fibre of his being into the effort to do so, he was inactive and the goal should stand.
A nonsense decision, but one Haaland might have felt he was due. The first time he’d lost at this ground, it was partly thanks to a similar dubious offside call, when the clearly offside Marcus Rashford ran on to a through-ball but ultimately left it for Fernandes to sweep the equaliser past Ederson.
Clearly, Rashford’s presence had affected City’s defenders, but the referees in their combined wisdom decided that, as he had not actually touched the ball, he was not affecting play.
The VAR that day was yesterday’s referee, Michael Oliver. Football fans are always asking for consistency, and Oliver at least is delivering.