Man Utd bailed out by brilliant Bruno to offer consolation to punished supporters | OneFootball

Manchester United have spent the summer punching down at the people who care about them the most. This comprehensive win over Ipswich felt like scant consolation in context.

Thousands of fans have had season tickets stripped from them, apparently for ‘potential misuse of their accounts’.

Ostensibly, it’s for passing tickets onto friends and family or, in one case, a mother accessing her six-year-old’s account on her own device.

The appeals process has been derogatory. Many suspect AI is involved, United subcontracting their brains as well as their hearts.

It’s become clear that the main issue Premier League clubs had with touting was they weren’t profiting from it.

Tickets returned to the club can be sold at a substantial mark-up to one-off attendees, rather than passed to your mate Steve who hasn’t visited the club shop since 1991.

Some even give out ‘dud tickets’ to random travelling supporters, meaning a trip to the home team’s ticket office and being asked to prove their identity.

In some ways, the suspected criminality that shaped attitudes to supporters in the 1980s has returned, with modern surveillance and modern greed.

English football has spent the summer clutching pearls at FIFA and America’s ticket practises, while merrily importing the same indignities here.

On the pitch, Old Trafford staged its opening game of 2026/27 under damp skies. Not coat weather, but you wouldn’t have been uncomfortable wearing one as the rain came in waves.

United have aped their rivals in buying players with ‘Premier League experience’, with Carlos Baleba paraded before kick-off, Youri Tielemans in midfield and Andrey Santos on the bench.

This trend apes the cultural conservatism growing across society. It may well raise United’s floor, but it’s hard to see them really gaining ground on their rivals this way.

All the money squeezed from United’s hardcore hasn’t financed a replacement for Luke Shaw. He was the future once, but Shaw’s been at almost all the post-Ferguson nadirs, always a split second too late to the scene of the crime.

Abdul Fatawu barged past the left-back for Ipswich’s opener, his cutback sidefooted in smartly by Leif Davis. The FPL pick du jour of summer 2024 almost scored again straight after as Old Trafford began to twitch.

Michael Carrick looked pensive on the sideline, although he rarely looks any other way. Once again Bruno Fernandes bailed United out, thumping home an equaliser after Marcelino Nunez slipped and United broke.

The game turned on a gloriously pedantic piece of VAR interpretation. Harry Maguire handled the ball just before scoring, but because his shot was off-target and deflected off Jacob Greaves, it wasn’t deemed relevant by the officials.

Once again, VAR has come for Gary O’Neil. He’ll be spending this evening lying in a darkened room with a flannel over his forehead.

Both the heavens and floodgates opened thereafter, and we were treated to a cameo from an old friend: the leaky Old Trafford roof.

Fernandes completed his hat-trick before Bryan Mbeumo added a fifth, lobbing Big Foot’s great-grandchild in the Ipswich goal.

It added gloss to the performance, but United weren’t as cohesive as the scoreline would suggest and they still look utterly reliant on Fernandes’ brilliance.

Marcus Rashford started too, for the first time in a United shirt for over 600 days. The demands of algorithmic content probably demand that he be front and centre of this piece, but he was merely okay.

There were some promising runs, a head-up directness that feels alien to the modern Premier League winger, but little end product. The footballing equivalent of a bag of Revels.

For their part, Ipswich didn’t look like a newly-promoted team for large periods of the game. They look to have recruited smartly – both Julio Enciso and Daizen Maeda had their moments.

There was a curious pre-match cameo where their players went over to applaud the away fans as if it was already full-time, all hunched together and slightly exhausted.

Whereas Coventry have looked undercooked for the task ahead, there was enough here to suggest Ipswich might be okay.

But we do urge their fans to shake the EFL songbook on show here; both ‘we support our local team’ and ‘football in a library’ were given repeated airings.

Ultimately, United are grasping for a routine. An end to psychodramas and lurching lows. They yearn for consistency, the reassuring sound of one foot after another and comfortable wins over the likes of Ipswich.

They eventually did just that on Sunday. But nobody should allow the deluge of goals to distract from what’s really going on.