A theory: this week, the first week after the first weekend of any new season, is the absolute worst week for knowing anything about anything.
Manchester United’s reliance on Wayne Rooney may be their undoing
They may have beaten Tottenham, but Manchester United need a top-class striker and Wayne Rooney didn’t look up to the job.
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Before things kick off, everything’s hedged. However confident and well-grounded any given prediction might be, it’s still a prediction, and however convincing a preseason victory was, it was still a friendly, and as such a training exercise. Nobody knows anything, but everybody knows that they know nothing, and so there’s a pleasing Socratic humility about the whole business. Yes, we still get the “five things we learned from Manchester United pinging 12 past some cones” columns, but there’s a certain apologetic shame buried beneath the pedagogy.
In a month or so, we’ll actually know things. Back in the old days -- before everything got so loud and shiny and kids listened to proper music, not like that noise you hear nowadays, coming out of their phones -- Match of the Day didn’t even bother with a league table for the first few weeks of the season. Apparently somebody at the BBC was of the not unreasonable view that looking at a league table after one round of fixtures would be a waste of time. (They stuck it up on Saturday night, of course. Gary Lineker had the grace to look slightly embarrassed behind his beard.)
But now? A thing has actually happened! Look at the thing! Learn from the thing. Samples sizes being what they are, we still know nearly nothing, yet that nearly nothing expands to fill all available space. Which brings us neatly to Wayne Rooney, who, on the evidence of 90 minutes up front on his own against Tottenham Hotspur, will be the reason that Manchester United fail to win the league, fail to win the European Cup, fail to win the FA Cup, fail to win the League Cup and fail, most importantly, to get the heart skipping, the juices flowing and the knees trembling. Because while he wasn't absolutely dreadful, he was largely rubbish.
That his rubbishness set up the goal is amusing, but not much comfort for United fans: dithering on the ball until a defender comes along and helpfully places the ball into his own net is not, we're going to suggest, a strategy that will pay off in the medium- and long-term. Own Goal is a handy presence in any squad, but you can't build a team around him. Roll that chance across the box to any of Rooney's peers at the Premier League's other top clubs, to Sergio Aguero or Diego Costa or even the sentient mass of hair gel and self regard that is Olivier Giroud, and Kyle Walker doesn't get a look in. Okay, so Giroud misses, but at least he gets the shot away.
Or step away from the goal and look at the rest of his performance. United were largely flat, and Rooney was the flattest. Two shots, one of which ended up going away from goal, and minimal involvement both inside and outside the box. A general lack of pace, a distinct lack of sharpness and yet more evidence of a profoundly unreliable first touch. The search for a positive forces us to look to his other jobs: he looks to be taking responsibility as the point man in the defensive press, he had several strong-looking words with the referee and did some excellent pointing.
The problem is not that Rooney had a bad game. Players have bad games; strikers often look unconvincing in unconvincing teams; and as we established not four paragraphs ago, the first game of the season is the worst game of the season when it comes to actually knowing what’s going on. United’s shortened preseason tour ended 10 days before kick off, and a little bit of rust is both expected and forgivable. The problems for Manchester United are that one, they don’t really have any alternative, and two, Rooney’s performance looked less like an early-season outlier, more like another episode of the same old schtick.
That second point first. Watching Rooney play over the last few seasons has been a profoundly dispiriting business. All the things that made him astoundingly exciting drained away long ago, of course, but all the things that made him exceptionally competent have been slowly going the same way. At his best, he’s still pretty good; at his worst, he’s a ponderous vortex that receives attention and service in inverse proportion to productivity and excitement. The ball goes in, and nothing much comes out. And the best days are getting rarer.
Now for the other problem. Rooney starts the season as Manchester United's main striker, and his direct competition consists of Javier Hernandez, who Louis van Gaal likes so much that he loaned him out last season, and James Wilson, who is a child. (Though that all said, both are at least quick.) He starts as the main striker having spent the last couple of seasons playing in a variety of positions with a degree of success, but usually with at least one other nominal forward alongside or ahead of him. And he starts as the main striker with a mere three weeks until the end of the transfer window.
Ultimately, it is exceptionally difficult to win the Premier League without an exceptionally dangerous striker, and we won’t know if Manchester United lack one for a good few weeks yet. Perhaps Rooney’s lethargic showing on Saturday was nothing more than a combination of rustiness and readjustment; perhaps Memphis Depay or the possibly-imminent Pedro will provide the missing spark.
But there’s a lot riding on that “perhaps.” Yes, it’s just one game. And yes, nobody knows anything and everybody’s guessing. But those guesses ... well, they’re coming off the back of a couple of years of Rooney the midfielder, Rooney the playmaker and Rooney the blunt instrument. And for United, they’re more than a little worrying.
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