Are Manchester United actually kind of almost good, or just a polished turd? | OneFootball

The mood at Manchester United has definitely shifted over the last couple of months, but – as with the team itself – we’d stop some way short of calling it a good mood.

Indeed, that is the very crux of the current problem for Ruben Amorim and Manchester United.

They are no longer utterly, humiliatingly mortifying. That deep sense of embarrassment at being just so profoundly sh*t that United felt throughout last season and into the start of this one has now dissipated.

The stain of finishing where they finished last season and bottling a cup final against a Tottenham – Tottenham! – side apparently being player-managed on the fly by Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven will never truly come off. And nor should it.

You don’t have to be This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About for that to be an unacceptable season. There can exist no mitigation that justifies finishing 15th and collecting fewer league wins than a Wolves team now making a historic attempt at knocking Derby County off their f*cking perch.

That shame will always be there. Grimsby will always be there.

But it’s fair to say now that those very darkest days do appear to be behind United. Things still aren’t perfect by any stretch. At almost any other period of United’s Premier League history their current effort would be a poor one, and that itself is part of the problem for anyone trying to turn this ship around.

Even after the historic lows of last season even the significant current improvement doesn’t constitute success.

And herein lies the ongoing niggle. United are now at the very least competent. That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but it’s a huge step up from last season. Competence is welcome at this stage.

But with it have already come some extremely irritating missed opportunities. Last year’s incompetence may have only slightly dampened expectations, with the club’s own stated aims for this season a nine-place leap into the top six, but it has handed United another advantage.

It’s not the advantage any club of United’s stature wants, but the absence altogether of any European football – with the Grimsby debacle almost eliminating midweek football altogether – offers United benefits that none of their theoretical rivals can enjoy.

And they just keep refusing to fully accept those chances. They have dragged themselves towards the top of the mid-table peloton but they really could have got themselves into something approaching Villa’s current situation.

United have only lost once in seven Premier League games since the start of November, but it’s a run riddled with annoyance and frustration.

The defeat was a ludicrous one, at home against a good-not-great Everton side who handed United an absurd early advantage by friendly-firing themselves down to 10 men.

And the other six games in that run have all been against distinctly beatable opponents. The league positions for the seven teams at the time United played them were 18th, 6th, 13th, 5th, 17th, 20th and 13th.

The sixth-placed team was Tottenham, who we now know to be more rubbish than that, and the fifth-placed one was Palace, who United beat. The only other win was against the team in 20th, who we don’t think we need identify by name.

In the last seven weeks United have drawn four games against opposition of bottom-half standard. And they have been in front in every single one of those games. In three of them they have led going into the final 10 minutes.

Sure, at Spurs they ended up salvaging a point in the last seconds but only after throwing away a winning position with six minutes of regular time remaining.

West Ham equalised on 83 minutes at Old Trafford, and Bournemouth 84 in a game United had already led twice and trailed once before getting their noses in front again to no avail with 11 minutes to go.

And such is the congested nature of the league table that these spaffed points really, really hurt. They have had so many chances now to get themselves into the (likely) Champions League places and every time they seem to sabotage themselves, very often infuriatingly late on in games.

Ifs and buts are candy and nuts, but when the table is so tight it is impossible to resist thinking about what might have been. There is a compelling case to make that United could have won every single one of their last seven league games, which is good. Instead, they have won only two.

Even turning two of the five failures into the wins United really should have managed would be enough to have them in the top four now. You might even, if you wanted to be entirely reckless, talk about them being on the fringes of the title race.

Instead: there they still are in the mid-table bunch, still having to worry every bit as much about what’s behind them as ahead of them, still in danger of slipping right back into mid-table should they stumble again.

So yes; it’s much better than it was. But what it was, was complete turd. At the moment they’re still doing little more than polishing it.