We like to tell ourselves that in life you get what you deserve. It didn’t look like the Manchester derby was going to work out that way for United’s little winger, Amad Diallo.
At one point you could have said the same for Amad’s Premier League career in general. Ralf Rangnick doubted whether he was physically cut out to play in the English top flight.
Ruben Amorim, though, has liked the look of him from the outset. Last night, Amad’s will to win combined with Manchester City’s will to lose to transform the game and perhaps Manchester United’s season.
It was a milestone win for Amorim, after he took the surprising decision to drop Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho from the squad. Unimpressed by the pair’s performances in training and in games, Amorim had decided to send a message about standards. 1-0 down with minutes to go and pondering which of Joshua Zirkzee or Antony might be more likely to change the game, even he might have been wondering if leaving Rashford and Garnacho out altogether had been a little extreme.
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But his team’s dogged persistence and Amad’s decisive flash of inspiration cast the decision as a masterstroke; supporters love a coach with the courage to take risks (at least when they pay off).
“Today the team proved that we can leave anyone outside the squad and manage to win if we play together,” Amorim said afterwards.
Bernardo Silva’s take on the game was bleak verging on bitter: “If in minute 87 of the game you’re winning 1-0, corner for your team, and the ball ends up with a penalty for them . . . my friend, if you make these kinds of stupid decisions, you deserve to pay for that”.
Bernardo did not sound overly sympathetic for his compatriot Matheus Nunes, whose mistakes had let United back into the game.
In today’s headlines, Bernardo’s interview might sound like a senior player fearlessly dropping truth bombs. In fact his account of the game was completely delusional. He presented it as a solid City performance and a result that had somehow slipped through their fingers due to uncharacteristic late errors.
“It’s a bit frustrating, because if you look at the game, there is only one team that can win . . . today, the last minutes we played like under-15s, and you pay the price.”
Actually this was an appalling performance from City, who never controlled the game and created hardly any chances. This team’s reputation is built on an ability to render opponents as helpless as patients etherised upon a table. Here they were scrapping and hoping, and more hoping than scrapping.
If anyone had played like the under-15s it was Manchester United, who were trying much harder than City, but kept making basic errors in promising positions. City looked like they would get away with it until Amad, assisted by Nunes, seized the day.
Nunes’ initial underhit backpass was bad, but it was his second error, crashing into Amad to concede a penalty when there was no easy way for the United player to score, that will imprint itself indelibly on his coach’s memory. It looked like the act of a man driven mad by fear.
Nunes arrived at City in summer 2023 for £53 million, £10 million more than Chelsea paid them for Cole Palmer, in one of the worst pieces of transfer business of the Guardiola era. He is a big-spaces player who ironically enough made his name with storming midfield performances for Ruben Amorim’s Sporting CP. He has never looked like he has the speed of thought or foot to fit in.
Maybe Guardiola’s failure to mould Nunes into a City-type midfielder is what made him decide it would be a good idea to welcome the then-33-year-old Ilkay Gundogan back from Barcelona last summer. Gundogan doesn’t have Nunes’ pace or physique, but Guardiola knows Gundogan gets it.
The increasingly-frequent frustration for Gundogan is that too many younger team-mates don’t seem to get it.
Last Wednesday, after City lost to Juventus in Turin, the German gave one of the searingly honest interviews that have become his trademark: “We overcomplicate things . . . We miss the right timing to release the ball and lose balls in transition every time and give them counter-attacks and have to chase every time 50 or 60 metres backwards. That’s not what we’re built for, we’re built for possession to keep the ball.”
Gundogan might as well have been commentating on the moment when City’s young winger Jeremy Doku lost the ball in a duel on the right wing and Juventus’s Weston McKennie ran through City’s open midfield – past the labouring Gundogan – to score the winner.
Lately it feels like Gundogan is always giving this same searing interview. As a Barcelona player he did the interview after important defeats to Real Madrid: “After such a result, I want to see more frustration, more anger and more disappointment”; and PSG: “Everything was in our hands and we just gave it away in the most simple manner . . . to get a red card [for Ronald Araujo] so early just kills the game.”
As a Germany player he gave a searingly honest interview after Germany lost 2-1 to Japan in the Qatar World Cup: “You felt that not everyone really wanted the ball. We lost the ball way too often and way too easily”; and again after they lost 4-1 to Japan (again) in September 2023: “We made too many individual mistakes . . . Maybe we think we are better than we are.”
In Gundogan’s account there is always some young chancer losing the games with silly mistakes in dangerous areas – your Dokus, your Araujos, your Leroy Sanés.
Those younger players might point to another common factor in Gundogan’s teams’ defeats; getting overrun in midfield by younger, fitter opponents. But no younger City player has yet dared to point it out.
