On nights such as these it can feel as though football is choosing to remind you of its true nature. Which is, it turns out, the most gloriously perverse, slow-burn, 400‑miles‑from‑home, 10.15pm on a Tuesday, waving your arms in the air, gripped‑with‑final‑plot‑twist-ecstasy pursuit ever devised.
For Manchester United’s travelling support this game must have felt like a slow-motion strangulation. Your team have had two shots on target all night. They’re 1-0 down against relegation-haunted West Ham – 95 minutes have passed. Narratives are being muddled. Arcs of hope reined in.
The ghosts of the Amorim era have begun to clank their chains at the edge of things. Maybe nothing is ever really solved. Maybe the sun does only set.
Two minutes later, as the players trooped off the pitch, that same away end was still tumbling over itself, arms in the air, gripped with the familiar sense of outraged glee.
Michael Carrick was free to stride back down the tunnel still looking like the taciturn ambassador of some minor Transylvanian city state, but with his reputation if anything enhanced by a show of late resilience.
In between Benjamin Sesko had scored a goal that really was a thing of beauty. It was a brilliant finish, scored with a single decisive touch, his fourth in 27 minutes on the pitch. Mainly, it was great because it involved use of the sidle.
Bryan Mbeumo crossed low from the right into a crowded penalty area. At which point Sesko, who is 6ft 5in, sidled past Axel Disasi. He sashayed. He snuck. A single long willowy leg shuffled in front of his man, the toe of his right boot snaking out and making perfect contact with the ball on the volley, flicking it in a perfect clean arc into the top corner, and even then doing it with a kind of nonchalance. Don’t mind me, I’m just going to sidle, yep, sidling now.
Disasi reacted like he had been shot between the shoulder blades with a potato gun, collapsing to his knees in an attitude of disbelief, the victim of a sidling. Sesko still has something unformed and puppyish about him, all pale, unmarked potential. But he also has five goals in six games now, only two of which he has started. Carrick talked about his finishing in glowing terms after the game. Nobody has been glowing about Sesko at United. This is good management.
And this was a good game for all its trapped energy. For long periods the London Stadium was almost totally silent, which is a strange thing in the middle of 60,000 people, most of whom are sat directly facing each other in this oddly angled sports-drome with its cliff-face stands.
East London had been drenched all day in an endless mist of February drizzle. By kick‑off the Stratford football complex was a strange fusion of Blade Runner styling and Jack the Ripper skies. United lined up in the Carrick formation, a strip-it-back 4-2-3-1.
For a while West Ham simply sat back in a solid block. They are an odd-looking team. At any given moment there are two West Ham possibilities. They are either defending in a low block. Or Jarrod Bowen is haring off in pursuit of a pass. These are their game states.
But West Ham played well here, even if a good point will have felt like a bad one by the end. Aaron Wan-Bissaka had a brilliantly adhesive game in defence, often splayed on the turf, legs whirling around, a kind of human catherine wheel, but still managing to snag, and fish and crook the ball into his arc.
There were long periods of stasis, nothing‑ball. At one point Lisandro Martínez just stood with the ball in the West Ham half and everyone waited, like giant chess pieces in a stately home garden. And five minutes into the second half West Ham took the lead. The goal was the work of two players, made by four slick touches between Bowen and Tomas Soucek.
It was helped by Luke Shaw’s weak attempted interception, first barged away by Bowen, then hurdled by Soucek, who dinked the ball out into the path of Bowen’s right-wing dash and kept running forward, making it just in time to veer between two defenders and clip Bowen’s cross into the corner of the net.
With 20 minutes still to go the West Ham defenders were high‑fiving and chest bumping a successful tackle or block. Everyone likes seeing this stuff. It feels like victory voodoo. But too early? Are we going too soon here?
Yes, as it turns out. And by the end this was another good game for Carrick, whose team had never before been a goal behind, never had to chase this kind of game. There were still good signs here, even in the fact this United team looked like they actually wanted to play football right to the end.
