In stoppage time at the Vitality Stadium, with Bournemouth holding Manchester United comfortably at arm’s length, the ends of this clanky low-rise stadium were rocking and bouncing with a sense of joy both in the moment and in the moments leading back from it.
Even the adverts on the stands told a tale of the club’s journey from there to there, a roster of local roofers and scaffolders, and bathroom fitters. No doubt KC Carpets of Poole, whose hoarding frames the away section, can now expect a surge in orders from China, India and every other nation touched by United’s 65 million TV viewers.
It has been a horrible week for Louis van Gaal’s team. The manner of defeat in Dorset, with a performance that was not only flaccid and static—although it was both those things—but genuinely odd, will be a concern even for those sympathetic to the rebuilding process.
United’s supporters have grown accustomed to stumbles and there was the usual boisterous encouragement from the away end even as they went behind in the second minute of this 2-1 defeat.
At some point, however, you do have to wonder how exactly England’s grand, glorious, helter-skelter champion club has managed to end up with a team quite this timid and disjointed.
Money has been spent. Van Gaal has been given space—and yet increasingly this looks like a team out of whack on some basic level, steaming and smoking their way very slowly uphill from a third-gear standing start.
There are mitigating factors. United may be listing but they are three points off the top of the table and second only to Newcastle United in the Premier League injury list, with five likely starters missing.
None of this explains the poverty of spirit and adventure shown by the collection of disparate individuals currently wearing the Manchester United shirt, however.
It is often said Van Gaal is picking up the pieces at the end of an empire. Of the starting outfield 10 at Bournemouth, seven were given a United debut by the current manager, evidence either of culpability or of the mess he inherited, depending on your sympathies.
The frustration is that Van Gaal could buy himself a huge amount of goodwill and patience if his teams at least suggested an intention to play with verve and adventure.
The constipated possession style has never fully been explained. Certainly, Van Gaal’s Ajax and Bayern Munich played with greater energy and speed.
There is a suspicion the manager has never fully recovered from the effect of those bruising defeats last autumn by MK Dons and Leicester City. The decision to reconstruct this team from the back, to school it in the basics of defensive solidity and ball-retention has been so much harder to implement in a league where tight scheduling and relentless physicality offers little respite to tinker and blend.
What is undeniable is the lack of balance. On a basic level the starting team was a weird mix of the notably slow—Daley Blind, Michael Carrick, Juan Mata, Paddy McNair, Marouane Fellaini—with a smattering of flyers. The right side of the team, given a torrid time by Josh King and Junior Stanislas, was alarmingly poor.
At one stage as United pushed, without really pushing, for an equaliser their five most advanced players were Andreas Pereira, Memphis Depay, Guillermo Varela and Nick Powell, with Powell, who played there a bit for Crewe as an 18-year-old, at centre-forward.
Personnel is in part an issue. And quite a few of United’s current first-choice XI are simply unremarkable footballers.
Depay has the swagger, the shirt and the price tag but he is a low-ceilinged No7 in a team with this level of ambition, a Haircut Player who, for all his attitude, seems to lack any real outstanding qualities of speed, skill, power or vision. At the heart of the team Carrick seemed to be playing with a ghosty imitation of himself at his back as the fretful McNair, lauded as a Carrick-in-waiting in the youth teams, demonstrated how hard it really is to do what United’s best one-paced manipulator of the ball has these past few years.
Poor choices have been made. Robin van Persie, Javier Hernández, James Wilson and Danny Welbeck have all been allowed to leave, with no full-time centre-forward signed.
Wilson is playing with freedom on loan at Brighton. Hernández has 16 goals this season, scored against Barcelona last week and rattled off a hat-trick on Saturday in the Bundesliga. The Mexican is hardly a complete footballer but his invention and energy near goal might just be the thing to bail out a stodgily functioning team in the short term.
On 49 minutes at the Vitality Stadium there was even a moment of what you might call Peak Van Gaal as United funnelled the ball backwards in a giant zigzag from a promising right-wing position to their own goalkeeper, travelling 150 metres the wrong way via a series of raking reverse passes, while maintaining in the process a pointless monopoly of possession. As Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, another unbending autocrat, asks the soldier sent up the Nung river to assassinate him: “Are my methods unsound?” The halting reply is: “I don’t … see … any method at all, sir.”
There was an obvious point of contrast four minutes later as Josh King scored the winning goal, made by a bold, driving forward run from Simon Francis to force the corner from which King sidefooted home.
United aside, Bournemouth deserve huge credit, not only for the fact but the manner of their victory, a result founded in Eddie Howe’s own process-ology of pass and move, and press. Howe barely cracked a smile in public afterwards, suggesting he would celebrate successive victories against the teams who have won nine of the last 11 Premier League titles by taking the dog for a walk.
It is still an astonishing, glorious moment for a club that six years ago to the day, were losing 5-0 to Morecambe in League Two, a few weeks after Howe himself had rejected an approach to replace Darren Ferguson at Peterborough . Howe is of course right not to raise his head from the real business at hand. After the game they were a point above Chelsea in 14th place and Bournemouth are playing with verve and confidence.
King, first spotted by Howe as a Manchester United junior, was relentlessly mobile in attack. Harry Arter played through the grief of losing a baby this week. He was magnificent, passing with precision, tackling and intercepting relentlessly and leaving the pitch to a man-of-the-match ovation. Arter has been a talisman for Bournemouth’s rise, a player who five years ago was playing for Woking in the Conference South. Here Arter and his teammates looked utterly at home as a high-energy, composed, quick-passing Premier League team.