Moyes needs to refresh team to avert crisis
David Moyes won’t see it like that, of course. Like every manager, he’s in the results business and the bottom line there is that a win is a win is a win. But to almost everyone else in the football world — and not least the club’s own increasingly restless fan base — victory over the side currently stuck at the bottom of the Premier League will amount to little more than a temporary easing of the pressure at Old Trafford. A draw away from home in this evening’s first leg tie will have much the same modest effect but, should United lose, then we can fully expect the impact to be disproportionately far greater. In that bleak scenario, expect the “crisis” to be upgraded to “full-blown” and Moyes’ position to move from “serious” to somewhere in the region of “grave”.
Which is a bit of a rum do when you remember this is a side retaining a live interest in the Champions League and for whom a top four finish in the Premier League is hardly the stuff of wild fantasy.
But, if David Moyes didn’t know it before he stepped into Alex Ferguson’s shoes, he certainly knows it now: when it comes to serial winners in sport any dip in standards is the mortals’ equivalent to a massive fall from grace.
Inevitably, the new man — and he must still be regarded as new in light of how long his predecessor had his feet under the desk — is having to field the bulk of the bitter flak currently raining down on the champions. And it’s showing in a public nervousness and sense of uncertainty which was never visible when Moyes was ruling the roost at Goodison and revelling in being able to get a team to regularly punch above its weight. But leading from the top requires a whole other psychological armoury. Stuck together with Fergie’s glue, United’s title last season owed at least as much to frailties in their challengers as it did to Robin van Persie’s season-changing goals. For all that he went out on a high in keeping with his prolific reign at the club, Ferguson’s triumphant last hurrah masked a number of significant structural deficiencies, the most glaring of which was, and remains, the absence of a world-class midfielder.
The failure to land one in the summer was the start of United’s troubles this season, the costly acquisition of the strictly limited Marouane Fallaini always likely to exacerbate the problem rather than provide a solution.
Not since Roy Keane and Paul Scholes were in their prime, have United had the necessary balance of fire and finesse in the heart of their team and, despite Wayne Rooney’s best efforts to provide both that midfield black hole has continued to suck the energy and confidence out of the team.
It hardly needs to be said either that replacing Cristiano Ronaldo in the long term was never going to be anything other than mission virtually impossible. Throw in recurring injury problems for the genuinely top class van Persie and, suddenly, the essential ordinariness of the squad Moyes inherited has been ruthlessly exposed.
The resultant draining of self-belief is nowhere more painfully evident than in the breaching of fortress Old Trafford where, with five defeats, United have already lost as many games at home this season as they did in the whole of 2012/13. Once nigh-on impregnable, the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ is holding less fear for increasingly emboldened visitors.
To that extent, having to head up to Wearside is hardly the worst option coming so quickly after United’s FA Cup Swansea swansong. Or, rather, it won’t be if, with a much stronger hand in play tonight, they don’t still somehow manage to suffer what would be surely written up as an even more ignominious defeat.
But that’s the detail: the bigger picture is what must now be concerning everyone at Old Trafford. David Moyes has already warned that the fans shouldn’t be holding their breath in anticipation of the marquee signing the club badly needs but unless he can refresh the team (Seamus Coleman for a start, anyone?) rehabilitate van Persie and retain Rooney, there is a danger that United’s sticky patch could deepen into a sustained decline.
Right now, that’s by no means inevitable. But if it does happen, then that really would be a crisis without recent precedent at Old Trafford.
