TF Match Report - Manchester Utd 0-2 United

How deep did your own personal trauma go? Maybe last year in the League Cup was therapy enough for you. Maybe Cabaye’s winner ten years ago already put you on the road to recovery. Probably not, though. We’ve all carried this round for longer than we care to admit.

For the last four days, all we’ve done is invent reasons why this couldn’t possibly happen. We’ve been too good recently. That couldn’t last. They’ve been too shit. Rashford would somehow emerge from purdah and score a hat trick. A correction was coming...

Except it wasn’t. Sometimes, history is just that. Nothing more. Not the slightest bit relevant to what we’re watching in the here and now. Instead of some inevitable cosmic comeuppance, what we saw tonight was the most complete and accurate confirmation imaginable of the current state of these two teams.

In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say we just witnessed the most one-sided half hour of football I’ve ever seen in more than 35 years of watching this lot. Not against some lower league opposition, not at home, but away at the most successful English club of my lifetime. It was beautifully, gloriously, impossibly embarrassing.

We’d barely digested the fact that Amorim had opted for a central midfield with a combined age of 64 and legs to match, when Hall sauntered down the left, plopped a simple cross in, and the real Sir Alex headed down and in at the Stretford End between a host a red shirts who were supposedly on defensive duty. Cue limbs, cue delirium, cue impending catharsis.

Fifteen minutes later and it was Gordon’s turn to whip a cross in from almost exactly the same position. This time it was big Joe who met it six yards out and powered the header home. Twenty minutes gone, 2-0, and it had been utterly effortless. No, those aren’t just words. I mean, totally, worryingly simple. This isn’t how football works, is it?

The thing is we could have been utterly out of sight already. In between the two goals both Joelinton and Gordon had blasted presentable opportunities high and wide. More culpably, Isak found himself one-on-one, only to do his usual bizarre thing of chipping the ball harmlessly into the keeper’s arms. When he twatted the ball home off the far post shortly after, he showed us all how to do it, only for the offside flag to spare the hilariously incompetent home side.

Still there was time for more in that opening half hour. Bruno and Sandro exchanged short sharp passes, Gordon flicked it back and Tonali somehow hit the post instead of the back of the net. Maybe he just felt sorry for them. I didn’t. And neither did any of the rest of the eye-rubbing, disbelieving, crowing away end. It could, should have been five. We wouldn’t have been flattered.

At the heart of it all had been Bruno. With Sandro running round doing the dirty work and the octogenarian Trafford United midfield hopelessly outmatched, Bruno had the time and space to pick pass after pass, after pass, after pass. When Zirkzee got humiliatingly hooked after half an hour, it was public acknowledgement of what we’d all seen with our own eyes. For once, the Theatre of (vomit) Dreams (TM) was delivering on its name.

And that was pretty much that. Højlund pulled a chance across the goal before Fab took pity on them and decided to pass the ball straight to Mainoo who played in the chubby Zimmer-framed Brazilian alongside him. He didn’t trouble Dubs who had surely the easiest night of his entire football-playing life. This was pipe and slippers stuff.

Rather than stick our collective foot on their throats, slice them open, remove their intestines, and put matters beyond doubt, we sat back in the second half. I guess we were just bored of attacking. Saving our legs for proper tests. Time ticked on and the inevitable onslaught still refused to come. With 70 minutes gone, we were oléing. There would be no squeaky bum time. Instead of the contracted 19 minutes of added time, there were only three. Nothing untoward happened. Literally nothing.

It was all too easy. I mean, really we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. This place of perpetual pain had become a simple, happy playground. Zero jeopardy. Only unrestrained, head-shaking joy, as we worked our way through the seasonal standards.

On one level, it seemed curiously irrelevant to point out that our backward red-and-white neighbours had run away, but it was a fittingly old school tune among various new fangled odes to Lewis Hall that baffled your aged correspondent. What we could all agree on was that the (not so) locals had seen United and were very much free to fuck off home. They did. Clutching their megastore bags, taking selfies outside the ground, and patting themselves on the back that they’d chosen the optimum parking space to escape early on their long drive home.

This feels like a turning-point. The end of an inferiority complex that has its roots in those deeply traumatic, desperate, unspeakable events of 1996. No more. Really, no fucking more. This was an exorcism. Those ghosts have been laid to rest. This place holds no fear. They are the irrelevance.

What a truly glorious time to be a Toon fan in Manchester. Not to mention its surrounding boroughs... Get the absolute, utter, immeasurable, joyful, ecstatic fuck in.

The future’s bright. It’s not blue, it’s definitely not red. It’s gloriously black and white. And it comes without the therapist's bills.

Matthew Philpotts